


Never On Your Own

by hostagesfic



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Depression, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 09:25:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1144316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hostagesfic/pseuds/hostagesfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Niall sells his place in London. It’s a Friday afternoon, and he signs the papers feeling a bit numb, a little stupid, and very, very glad. His agent looks worried, and asks if he needs a minute to think about it. Niall doesn’t, but he smiles at her anyway, is polite when he shakes his head, “Nah, thanks. ‘m good.” He isn’t, but he doesn’t think it’s much of a lie when everybody knows.</p><p>Or, Niall sells everything he owns in London and buys a posh old castle by the ocean in Ireland. Hidden away from the outside world, he's sad and lonely until one day, he isn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, irresponsible use of medication and inappropriate mixing with alcohol but no abuse, consideration of mental issues, use of medicinal marijuana, disordered eating (as a symptom/consequence of PTSD). **[Additional trigger warnings containing spoilers in the end notes.](http://archiveofourown.org/chapters/2316410#work_endnotes)**
> 
> “Never On Your Own” begins in the fall of 2012, just after the boys’ press tour in Europe. It’s canon compliant up until that point, and to our knowledge up until that point. (The [LIC](http://hostagesfic.tumblr.com/tagged/lic) is shamefully absent simply because we didn’t know enough about them in fall of 2012. Also because if they were included there’s no way they’d let Niall be angsty aka like 90% of this plot. Additionally, our Niall drives even though in canon, he hadn’t got his license yet. And medicinal marijuana is legal in our Ireland. /artistic liberties).
> 
> Title from Don’t Forget Where You Belong by One Direction. Accompanying fanmix by lilourry [here](http://slightparagon.tumblr.com/post/73922999877/fanmix-for-never-on-your-own-by-hostagesfic). (We’re sorry in advance.)

 

> _No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee._
> 
> \- [Meditation XVII](http://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/), John Donne

Niall sells his place in London. It’s a Friday afternoon, and he signs the papers feeling a bit numb, a little stupid, and very, very glad. His agent looks worried, and asks if he needs a minute to think about it. Niall doesn’t, but he smiles at her anyway, is polite when he shakes his head, “Nah, thanks. ‘m good.” He isn’t, but he doesn’t think it’s much of a lie when everybody knows.

Niall’s stopped looking at his bank account. He had, briefly, tried to be more responsible and more aware, but it didn’t make a shit of a difference in the face of their career. They were paid to be irresponsible, oblivious little fucks. The only thing that mattered was they’d lick each other’s faces and dance around on stage and insist they _didn’t_ dance. But now —now, he doesn’t, and he’s not happier, but it’s easier.

There’s too much money in there for one person, and he couldn’t take those monstrous digits staring back at him.

He can’t take the crowds, either; they line up around the block of the offices where he’s been putting his name to a thousand papers. There was a time he would’ve braved them with a laugh and a bit of banter as they waded it through the slew of bodies. Instead, he waits them out.

He misses his flight and the next, and it’s Sunday morning by the time he lets himself be ushered into a black car with tinted glass and driven to the airport. 

He keeps a pair of Ray-Bans on as they lift off, and they’re too big for him, sliding down his nose. He just pushes them back up, jams them onto his face and wipes his cheeks off with the cuff of his hoodie sleeve. London looks big and messy, sprawled out beneath him, and he remembers the first time he saw it. He hated it and loved it then in equal proportion, eager and greedy for a new life even as anxious as he was to outgrow the old. 

Now things are simpler. 

He’s glad to leave.

;

Niall hadn’t seen the house when he bought it; Jen from the agency asked if he wanted to fly out and look it over, and he said no—in the same way that he’d said no to his mum’s invitation to move back in with her and management’s gentle suggestion that he take some time at a retreat center in Bath; the same way he’d said no when Josh called him to ask if he wanted to talk; and the same way he’d said no when someone asked him on Twitter if he was “done.”

Niall thinks he’s gotten rather good at saying no by now. 

It’s an hour and a half drive from Donegal Airport, and Niall drives it on his own (saying no one last time, to Preston’s offer of playing chauffeur). He stops once, picks up a coffee and a bag of scones, and when a girl at the petrol pump across from his looks like she might recognize him, he grabs the receipt from the pump with shaking fingers and accelerates almost too fast, pulling onto the road and not looking back.

He gets to the house at half three; he half expects the code not to work on the gate, but it opens slowly, and he pulls into the drive. He knew it was by the ocean, but hadn’t wanted to imagine what that meant. “Don’t need any more disappointments,” he’d told Jen, when she made a face. But it’s pretty, in person.

No, pretty isn’t the word. It’s impressive. Niall has plenty of time to take it in as he pulls up the drive; it’s big, he knew that, but seven thousand square feet looks different nestled into the heather hills above roiling water and dark rocks. It’s all grey stone and dark slate tiles, the stain of moss in patches across the face of it. It’s what the description said, anyhow: a real fairy tale castle by the ocean. Niall has to smile a bit.

It’s not his style at all, but it’ll do.

;

It’s pretentious as fuck. 

Granted, it _is_ a castle, Niall supposes, and he’s not sure that a castle could be anything other than pretentious, given that it’s the twenty-first century. But it’s still pretty bad. There’s a big staircase in the foyer that leads up to the bedrooms, and there’s another staircase, a spiral, in the two-story library. A _two-story library_. Niall can’t even remember the last book he read.

(That’s a lie. He can: it was Bradbury’s _The Cat’s Pajamas_ , and Zayn had left it on his bed in a hotel in Cologne, and he’d picked it up when Zayn was in the shower, had made a big deal of reading it out dramatically when he emerged in a towel. Zayn had rolled his eyes and tried to grab it back, sighed and, finally, giggled. Niall doesn’t think it counts.)

There’s also a drawing room with a baby grand and a record player and a huge, awful, red tufted leather sofa with rounded arms in front of the fireplace. 

Niall stares at it, for a moment, and blinks; turns to Reilly, the housekeeper. “Could we... move that away.” He sounds calm, he thinks, calm and reasonable. 

The man’s face betrays the fact that Niall is still bad at reading people, even himself. But he nods. “‘Course. I’ll have the movers put it in the attic?” His brogue is thicker than Niall’s, and Niall wonders, idly, if he’ll slip back into his own.

“Yeah,” Niall says. “Sure.”

He watches them lift it, the floor creaking under the loss of its weight, a dust bunny dancing away, watches them manhandle it up the stairs. 

It really was an ugly sofa.

;

The first night, Niall falls asleep in the recliner in the smoking room. He’d holed up there after dinner, sandwiches Reilly took out of the industrial refrigerator on a big platter and set on the counter beside a bottle of Guinness, like he knew Niall. Niall had eaten his way through half a chicken salad and left the crusts on the platter when he put it back in the fridge. Left the beer unopened on the counter.

He wakes up to cramps and his shirt feels damp and cold. The TV is buzzing, and when he knocks the remote off the arm of the recliner it startles to life, playing easy jazz as a weatherman points out pockets of rain around Dublin. Niall watches him cycle through the report three rounds and then gets up. He’s unfamiliar and out of place in the dim light of the house, stumbles into a table and then a lamp before he gets out the door into the hallway. There’s cool, weak light brimming from the kitchen at the end of the hall, just enough that Niall can identify the bathroom in time to make it to the toilet before he’s throwing up.

;

In the morning, he can’t wait to get out. Reilly’s left him half an omelette in a pan on the stove, and there’s muffins in a bag on the counter, but Niall’s not hungry, so he skips breakfast. His stomach is still wound tight up around his ribs, and he’s jumpy with the feeling. Instead, he follows the footpath down to the shore. It takes longer than he was expecting, a good ten minutes at an easy pace that makes his knee burn but doesn’t freeze it up, and then he’s stepping onto the sand and the entire shore opens in front of him, brisk and windy in the late morning sun. 

Niall takes a deep, exhausting breath; exhales until his lungs are burning and sucks in the salty air until he’s coughing. He does it again and again until he hears someone else’s voice in his ears, counting them out. 

Then he stops.

The water is chilly when he lets it soak through the Converse he’s wearing, and they’re big enough that for a moment, as the waves come in, it feels like he’s floating away.

Niall stays on the beach until the sun starts to go down. His throat is dry and his eyes burn, and his clothes are soaked through and dried stiff with salt water. There’s sand clinging to his trousers from where he sat down at the edge of the tidal pools. Chilled to the bone, he still feels like his face is crusted over with sunburn. 

It’s hard, getting to his feet on damp, sludgy sand with his bum knee. Niall goes light-headed when he’s finally upright, has to lean over and close his eyes against how loud the surf has gotten, how empty his stomach feels. He would’ve been embarrassed, once, but here there’s no one to see. It’s going to take some getting used to.

;

He has a yoghurt from the fridge and pours himself a glass of milk. It takes him longer than it should, going through all the cabinets to find the cups, and then again searching the drawers for spoons. Reilly’s at the kitchen table with a steaming mug of doctored hot cocoa and a newspaper, but he doesn’t ask if Niall needs help, and Niall appreciates that. 

Looking over at the bright red kettle on the stove, for a moment he thinks—but then decides against it. He doesn’t really want tea.

“Derby beat Forest,” Reilly observes, and fingers the newspaper edges thoughtfully. 

“Yeah?” Niall says, digging out a lump of fruit from his yoghurt and chewing it carefully. 

“Yeah,” says Reilly.

Niall finishes his yoghurt in silence, taking in the kitchen. He hadn’t really looked, the night before, but it seems nice enough. It’s a weird mix of the original floorstones and big, porcelain sink and brushed silver appliances, six-eye gas range. It’s the kind of kitchen he would love, Niall guesses, if he still cooked much. 

Maybe he’ll buy a recipe book. 

Maybe he won’t.

“So,” Reilly says, when he’s drained the last of his drink and moved around Niall to put it in the sink. He rubs his hands together, cracks the big knuckles. “I could show you the upstairs, if you’re interested.”

Niall nods, and pours out the rest of his milk, tosses the yoghurt cup. “No better time than the present.”

;

They take the main staircase, and Niall thinks, belatedly, that he should’ve reviewed the real estate listings on their possession of a lift. As it is, he clings to the bannister and grits his teeth. 

There’s a long hall splitting the upstairs, and Reilly flicks a switch, sending light skittering into heavy wall sconces. “You’ve got a study,” he says, knocks the frame of the first door on Niall’s left. Inside, Niall makes out more bookshelves, more heavy leather furniture. Another oriental rug, another fireplace. Reilly seems to realize he won’t be too interested, and is already gesturing at the next door, “Linen closet; mostly the maids leave their stuff in there.” 

He shows off another two rooms that he informs Niall are sitting rooms; Niall has no impression of them beyond the fact that they have dark curtains over the wide windows and heavy furniture and look like something out of the West Wing of the Beast’s Castle. “Not been any use for ‘em in a while,” Reilly says, and Niall guesses not.  
  
There are three bedrooms at the end of the hall, and a bath, and then they move back down the corridor. On the other side of the foyer, there’s another bedroom and a door to the upstairs catwalk of the library before they reach the master suite, with its bath and walk-in closets. “I had your bags put up here last night,” Reilly says, motioning to where Niall’s sad little backpack and duffel are propped up together on a luggage rack. “But y’don’t have to use this room, obviously.” 

It’s too big for one person, but when Niall thinks about how the other bedrooms would fit better, they seem claustrophobic. “This is good,” he says. 

Reilly nods. “Me rooms are off the servants’ stair, down by the kitchen, if you need anything.”

 _Servants’ stair_ , Niall thinks, and stifles a sigh at how ridiculous it all is. Proper fairy tale castle. 

He turns to thank Reilly, but he’s already gone.

;

The cars arrive the third day. It’s a little silly, but nobody will ever find out, and Niall doesn’t give a fuck if they do. 

There’s the gatehouse to fill up, anyhow, six bays as advertised in the listing. He watches from the front step as the trailer comes down the drive, as the movers back them in. He gives a little wave, but doesn’t go over, lets Reilly sign the slips and write the check for the foreman of the moving team. 

Later, he walks across the yard, stepping through the ridges left in the cold ground by the trailer wheels. They’re lined up for him neatly, glossy and new-looking. He rubs his fingertips over the hoods, red and black and gunmetal and electric blue, smooth and dead cold to the touch. He doesn’t look in the windows.

;

He doesn’t feel at home in the house. It’s too big, and there’s some truly awful wallpaper in the bedrooms. It’s better to have the house furnished than not, though. As much as he despises the candelabra wall sconces in the upstairs hall and the floor-length mirror in the first guest bedroom, Niall can’t imagine having to pick out furniture by himself. The things he can’t handle are slowly moved to the attic, anyway, and it’s livable, really, which is all Niall could ask for.

The staff don’t get in his way, much. As housekeeper, Reilly has kept everything running and the power turned on and groceries ordered for the last two owners, and Niall likes him, likes his quiet sort of confidence, knows his last name but never quite remembers it. Reilly never seems offended. 

There are two maids who come in twice a week, to clean and dust and bake, keeping the big, drafty kitchen full of fresh smells. They don’t try to talk to him, and he’s alright with that. Niall doesn’t know what he’d say to them if they did. 

Someone must come to mow the grass and trim the hedges in front of the house, but Niall barely skims the monthly receipt, the neat lines of what he’s paying these people to keep him away from the real world. 

And that’s it. Most of the time it’s just Niall and Reilly, alone in the big house, passing like ships in the night as they slip past each other in the corridors.

;

Niall wakes up in a hammock. It’s summer, and everything smells like fresh mown grass and, faintly, of eggs. _Breakfast_ , he realizes, and tumbles out of his hammock—his knee doesn’t protest, for once, and he spares a second to rub at it before walking over to the camp fire. “You didn’t save me any?” he asks, and Harry laughs. “How can you say that when you’re looking straight at what we did save you?” It’s not enough, by far, maybe just barely two eggs scrambled with bacon and some green onions, but Niall heaves a sigh and accepts a plate.

Someone is singing _buy a big house where we_ all _could live_ _—_

Niall wakes up, and it’s not summer. He’s fallen out of the big, four poster bed, and his knee is screaming. His throat is sore again, and it takes him several minutes to realize its because he’s screaming, too.

;

At breakfast, Reilly doesn’t say anything. He grunts a bit when Niall sits down opposite him at the table, gives him a cursory nod over his paper, but that’s it. Niall’s palms still feel sweaty, and he gets through half a bowl of oatmeal before deciding that he’s put too much honey in. 

“Goin’ into town to pick up food and y’bags,” Reilly says, when Niall’s rinsing his bowl in the sink. “Anything you want, just put on the list.” Niall doesn’t have time to ask before he’s gesturing at the refrigerator. “‘s on there.” 

Niall looks over it, wiping his damp hands on his basketball shorts. Trying to think of what he wants gives him a headache, and he steps away before he’s gotten to the end of the items. “Looks good,” he says. 

He’s to the door before Reilly raises his head. “Maids come t’day, they’ve got their own keys,” he says. “Better if you keep outta their way, though.” 

Niall nods, runs his hand over the frame of the door. It’s thick, old like everything seems to be in the house. Solid. “Thanks.”

Reilly waves his hand. “Eh.”

“I’m—” Niall shifts his weight, his knee twinging. “I’ll just... be down at the shore.” 

Looking up, Reilly gives him an amused quirk of his eyebrows. “Don’t have to report to me, lad.” 

Niall shakes his head, and the smile feels strange, stretching his lips funny. “I guess not,” he says. 

“Had you on a tight string,” Reilly says, and his voice is too much like kind. 

Niall backs down the hallway, lets the door slam on his way out because he can.

;

He hears Reilly’s car pull down the drive on his way down the footpath. He’s taking it slower than the day before, stopping twice to massage his calf and catch his breath. Wishing he’d thought to take his pain meds before coming down, Niall briefly considers going back for them. But he’s halfway, now, and more stubborn than in pain. 

It’s colder today, or maybe he’s noticing it more. Possibly he’s wearing a lighter jacket. Niall doesn’t remember what he wore yesterday. Today—he looks down at himself, vaguely aware that he dressed in the hazy light of the master bedroom, spent too long searching through his duffel for a pair of socks—he’s got on a soft cardigan and a henley that’s stretched about the neck. It had smelled safe when he pulled it over his head, though.

He curls up at the edge of the dunes, between clumps of some dry, reedy looking plant that rustles like a rain stick in the ocean breeze. 

Niall doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until he’s startled awake by some phantom noise. It sounded like car horns, but when he pulls himself upright from where he’d slumped in the grass, it’s just gulls, wheeling overhead in what might be an early afternoon sky. 

Rubbing at his eyes, he traces their paths, wonders if they’re looking for food or just entertainment. His knee has gone stiff, and he has to work at it, warming it with his breath and testing it with false starts, before he can get up. He stumbles as he makes his way up to the house. 

;

His mother calls just after dinner. Niall hasn’t touched his cell phone since he arrived; he isn’t entirely sure where it is, even, and he’s grown accustomed to the phantom weight in his pocket. He doesn’t blink when the house phone rings in the kitchen. Reilly gets up and answers and Niall is busy with the sudoku he asked to rip out of the paper, only hears when Reilly clears his throat a second time. “‘s your mam.” 

He raises his head slowly, pen dangling in his fingers. “My mam?”

Reilly rolls his eyes. “What she says.” 

Niall gets up and takes the phone. He doesn’t raise it to his ear until he’s already in the smoking room, leaning into the big window and watching the waves catch the last of the dying sun. “H’lo?”

“Niall,” she exhales, and a surge of panic floods Niall’s chest. 

He swallows. “Hey, ma.”

“Is the place alright?” she asks, and Niall can tell she’s trying so hard not to talk too fast, not to overwhelm him, just with one simple question. Vaguely, he thinks maybe it should annoy him. “I’m glad you answered.”

“It’s alright,” he confirms, fingertips trailing across the worn windowsill. The castle is old, and he refers to it as such in his mind, but if he had to say it he’d use any word but. It’s elegant, and posh, and _stupid_ , and...

“Have you been taking your medicine?”

“Yeah,” Niall says, and it’s not entirely a lie. He’s _meant_ to take it, anyway.

“I’m sorry, pet,” Maura says, softly, and Niall isn’t sure if she means for asking or for calling or for the why of it all. “I just wanted to make sure—”

He does know what she means to say, then. That he’s alright, that he’s doing okay. “Yeah,” he says, because to let her finish would be to hear it in his head for the rest of the night. 

She inhales, and Niall realizes that he’s been holding the phone to his ear so tightly that it’s begun to hurt. They share the cracking silence for a long time that’s merely seconds, and then Maura says, “That nice lady called, Katie? She said they could still get you in the next session if you wanted to try the—” 

“No,” Niall says, carefully, like he’s been practicing. “Ma, I’m not gonna do their programs, that’s shit.”

“Alright,” says Maura, and leaves it. 

“I love you,” Niall tells her, because he can’t say, _Please let me go_.

“I love you too, pet.” 

Niall hangs up, because she sounds too sad, and he’s made a million people proud in the last two years, but all that matters now is this one disappointment.

Reilly takes the phone from him without asking, and doesn’t stay; he flicks the main lights off on his way up the stairs to his rooms, and Niall sits at the kitchen table and stares at his lines of numbers.

When he makes it to the bathroom to wash his face, brush his teeth, Niall doesn’t look in the mirror. But he does dig through his backpack to find the little bottle with the death rattle, swallows two pills dry and crawls into bed in his clothes.

;

Niall is eighteen and it’s the middle of the summer in Los Angeles and he’s wearing sunscreen layered underneath a light dusting of matte powder. He can hear the waves and the wind and the playback track and a laugh, but he can’t really turn his head to see where it’s coming from. He knows it’s Liam’s.

There’s an arm around his shoulders, and he can’t look down to see the hand that’s flat against his breastbone, but he knows that’s Zayn’s; can feel his narrow side, too, and his ribs and the heartbeat beneath them. The hand on his lower back is Harry’s.

It’s odd, because he wants so badly to look away to the four people surrounding him: to the sky, or the sand, or the water, anywhere but the camera; but then the song cuts out, and Niall’s suddenly turning to face the water, and a wave crashes against Louis’ back, tinged silver and sharp and... and not water, and Niall wakes up and it’s just the fucking sand caked to the hem of his trousers, the sound of the surf pounding the rocks below his window. It’s just a dream.

;

The big moving crate arrives the next morning. 

Niall doesn’t want to touch it, not on three hours of sleep and an empty stomach that couldn’t keep down the eggs Reilly had kept warm on the stove for him. But the delivery men and Reilly get it up to the steps and unlocked and then the truck driver is saying he’ll be back when they give him a head’s up, and Niall is staring it down, its gaping door looks like a mouth waiting to swallow him up. Niall dives in.

It’s clothes, mostly. He’d never decorated his flat all that extensively, and he’s grateful for it now, as he’s left with row upon row of shoeboxes. It’s mindless, unpacking them and taking them up the stairs, restacking them in neat rows in his closet. 

Then he gets to the unmarked boxes at the back. He doesn’t think much of it when he opens the first one, about the size of a shoebox, and there amongst the packing peanuts is a single lump in thick layers of bubble wrap. He peels off the tape and unwinds the bubble wrap and what’s beneath it is covered, too, in brown paper. He tears the paper, and at the first sight of the narrow red and white and blue statuette, drops it.

Niall closes his eyes, but it’s still there, it’s still _right there_ , and he backs away, stumbling upright and out of the crate with his eyes still squeezed shut. He knocks his head on the doorway of the shipping container and nearly trips backwards onto his front steps. And he can still see it, the glossy finish and a stripe of red face-down in the wrapping.

He’s headed for the beach before he thinks about it, walking all too quickly for his knee. He doesn’t come back until the sun is dipping into the horizon and he can’t see the flashbulbs, can’t feel the cold material clutched in his hand, can’t hear the voice saying his full name or his own mumbling a drunken apology. When he gets back in the house he takes his medicine and eats the dinner that’s set out for him. 

His clothes are in stacks on the stairs, and the boxes, every last one, are gone. He doesn’t have to think twice to know Reilly’s moved them to the attic.

;

The cool thing about owning a fucking _castle_ , he realizes at some point, is that with enough desperation and a sense of adventure, you can find a cabinet of Scotch that’s more expensive than the collective cost of everything you’ve eaten in the past month, and since it’s _your_ fucking castle, you can get shitfaced on it.

Niall doesn’t really have to look too far. Sitting on the floor in the drawing room where the ugly red sofa once was, a bottle between his fingers, he wonders if the previous owner was an alcoholic. He wonders if this is what his mother was afraid of. 

He’s suddenly grateful he’d at least made it partially through unpacking, because he doubts Irish castles come equipped with _Take Care_ on vinyl. The drawing room has superb acoustics and it takes a little too long to make his fingers work right, get the needle on the record, but finally, _finally_ , he’s surrounded by the familiar beats. They thrum warm in his chest, heated by the alcohol and lethargy, numbing his tongue and dulling his thoughts.

Once his head is pleasantly swimming and the record has reached the interlude, it makes dramatic sense for him to step on the bench and lie back on the baby grand, and he pumps his fist a little when the whiskey doesn’t slosh out of the bottle as he sets it down at his side. He spends a few minutes wondering how much he’d have to jostle the bottle to have it spill, now, and then some more trying to decide if it’s half full or half empty.

In the end, he just takes a few more swigs until it looks emptier than full.

He tries getting down, but it’s a long way to the floor and his knee is aching, a slow pulse that’s wound up around his heartbeat in his ears, and so he just tips his head over the edge instead, stares at the room upside down.

;

When Niall opens his eyes, it takes him a minute to realize it’s morning. He’s apparently developed a nasty habit of not noticing when he passes out. His head is pounding and his mouth is dry and it’s the worst hangover he’s had since... well. 

But he’s not on top of the piano: when he tries sitting up he realizes he’d apparently crawled under it instead, fallen asleep on the thick, itchy oriental rug. His cheek is tingling with pins and needles, and when he raises his hand to rub feeling back into it, there’s a hasty scrawl down his arm. Niall blinks, slowly, between the words on his forearm and the red sharpie he’d apparently fallen asleep on top of after writing them out.

He crawls out from under the baby grand carefully. The drawing room is bathed in cold morning light, streaming in through the tall windows. The bottle of Scotch is set on the bookshelf next to the record player. Niall has a moment of panic and hobbles over to investigate, but apparently his drunk self had remembered to pull the needle back before collapsing. The vinyl lays on the turntable without a scratch. 

Niall looks down at his arm, rubs his fingers over the red lettering, the way it bleeds across his skin nothing like a real tattoo. _Far away._

There’s no leftover breakfast in the kitchen that morning, just a note on the fridge from Reilly, _Out, call if you want anything from the shops_. Niall rubs at his temples and gets himself a glass out, filling it up with water. It’s the first time he’s used the filter on the fridge, and the water tastes funny. 

;

A few days later, he wakes up with purpose. Reilly doesn’t point out the mostly faded outline of the letters on his arm, and Niall eats the full English set out for him, not in a rush, but still like he needs it. He heads upstairs slowly, minding his knee, and takes a shower, and when he combs his hair in front of the mirror he realizes it’s almost entirely brown, only with hints of blonde at the ends. He puts down the comb and runs his hands through it instead. He thinks about how there’d been a point where even a hint of roots would have him calling Lou or Hannah up, begging them to make time to “fix it.” Niall’s not sure why he ever liked his hair blonde.

It’s become a struggle to find clothes. Not that he’s run out: he doesn’t even have the excuse of laundry, because housekeeping comes in every few days to gather up anything he’s left in the bathroom and return it, neatly folded, to his only-made-when-they’re-around bed. It’s just hard to choose. Mostly he stays in his sweats and hoodies, even though the house is getting colder, and sweatpants are a nightmare when they get wet and sandy. 

He finds the right thing to wear, anyway. He supposes it was a little bit selfish to take the white henley but it’s not like he can return it now. It fits him just right, and he pulls on a hoodie over it, wears jeans for the first time in... he doesn’t know how long, doesn’t try to guess as he walks to the gatehouse.

Two weeks? Niall isn’t exactly sure what day it is. His mum had called again, and then his dad, but he hadn’t picked up.

It’s not until he’s standing in front of the gatehouse with his wallet and keys in a death grip that he realizes what a shit idea this is (“They’re _collectibles_ ,” they said and Niall had laughed, but that’s what the cars are, after all, a matched set to put on the shelf), and turns back. His Range Rover sits under a tree out front and he tells himself it’s better to save his masochism for later. Sitting behind the wheel, he takes deep, timed breaths, tugs absentmindedly at the bracelet around his wrist, and finally turns the key.

The drive into town is easy; he passes just two cars and the rain has let up to an on-and-off drizzle. He stops at a pharmacy and asks the man behind the counter if there’s a tattoo place in town as he pays for a pack of chewing gum. There isn’t, but the town over, about a half hour away, has a parlor. Niall gets back in the car and keeps driving with the radio off and a stick of gum in his mouth, the Ray-Bans he’d worn on his flight to Ireland tucked into one of the cupholders.

The tattoo parlor is nothing more than a sign on the side of a pub that says _Entrance through_ and then the pub’s name in dingy neon. Really, Niall could stand to have a drink. He parks on the side street and pushes the door open. 

It’s nothing too special; it’s nothing special at all, to be honest. Niall hauls himself onto a stool at the bar and takes in the mostly-empty tables. There are a few construction workers in a corner, maybe a businessman or two meeting for a pint, but he’s the only one at the bar. “What’ll you have?” the guy behind the counter says, raises an eyebrow at him. Niall sort of wants to tell him to fuck off, but he needs this drink. “A pint,” he says instead. “Tattoo place open?” 

“Eh,” says the barman. “I reckon it is, yeah.” He gives Niall another unimpressed look and turns to pour the Guinness. 

Niall plays with his keys in his lap. He shouldn’t be having to do this on his own. He gulps a big mouthful of froth before the pint has settled and hands the man cash. “Alright if I take this with me?” he asks, holding up the glass, and the man shrugs.

The stairs down to the tattoo parlor are steep and narrow and hell on his knee, but Niall makes it downstairs without spilling his drink or falling over pitifully. The exposed brick walls are lined with framed sketches and prints and pictures, shamrocks in every shape and size, tattooed onto arms and legs and, in one case, next to an eye.

“What can I do for ya, lad?” comes a voice, and Niall has to take a few steps to see the woman sat behind a desk at the corner, a cigarette and a pencil between her fingers and a glass bottle of Coca-Cola set carefully away from the sketches before her. There’s ink across her arms and two studs at the edge of her eyebrow, and she looks old enough to be his mother’s age, if not older.

“It’s simple,” Niall says, and in no time he’s taking off his shoes and lying down on a cushioned table. The woman hums something that sounds like Elvis under her breath as she shaves the areas with a disposable razor. She lets Niall sit up and finish the last of his pint (he thinks, vaguely, that maybe you’re not supposed to drink before getting a tattoo) and when he lies back down, she holds the arch of his foot with a gloved hand and gets to work.

When the needle touches his skin, Niall’s acutely aware of two things: for one, it’s not better or worse than he expected, just about right, and he can blame the ache for the few tears that escape him. There is, too, an odd sort of pressure at his wrist, like his bracelet has gone heavier, cinched tighter since the gun started up and pressing down into his skin, and he pulls his fingers into a fist. “What’s that?” he asks as the woman wipes down the first one and shifts her stool to work on the second. He could have sworn she muttered something under her breath.

“What’s what?” the woman hums, not looking up from her work, and before Niall can clarify, _You said_ _—_ , she’s started on the second.

Once she’s finished, she cleans up the traces of ink, and Niall picks constellations out of the water stains on the ceiling rather than watch as she wraps the angry little x marks. “These’ll heal fast,” she tells him, and Niall just smiles a little. “Keep ‘em clean, buy a bottle’a lotion and let them breathe. Don’t lick ‘em within the week.” Niall’s surprised into a laugh, and she grins. “That’s better.” 

When he sits up, she’s already detaching the needle and snapping off her gloves. Her hands move quickly, efficient and practiced, nothing amateur. Catching him watching, she nods. “That’s all for today?”

“All I wanted,” Niall confirms. 

;

Niall goes down to the beach when he gets back to the house. It’s late, and he’s never been on the shore for the sunset that he remembers. It’s hell, walking down in his shoes rubbing the edges of the bandages, his knee protesting at the cold and the climb. 

He found a rare piece of driftwood on an almost-sunny afternoon; dragged it out of the surf and let it dry in the sun among the grass in the dunes. It’s a better seat than the sand, or at least easier to get up from, and he can spread his legs out in front of him and watch the golden light peek from the clouds just in time to fade into the ocean. The throbbing in his ankles syncs up with the pounding of the waves against the boulders down the beach, directly under the house. 

Niall wishes there weren’t so many gulls.

;

There’s a match on the telly that night. Reilly’s made hot wings and chips, the easy kind out of the bag and onto the pan and into the oven, and Niall thinks again, maybe he could give cooking a go. He doesn’t ask if he can join, and Reilly doesn’t invite him, but they both end up in the smoking room, slowly making their way through a six-pack of Harp with four bottles left. 

It’s a rather shit match. Niall doesn’t have the attention span for telly, really, keeps picking at the faint sharpie on his arm and thumbing around the knobs of his ankles where the skin still feels tender. Halfway through, he gets up to go to the bathroom and ends up in his upstairs bedroom, digging through his backpack. He finds his charger easily, though the phone itself takes a bit longer. It’s been off since he got to the house, dead on arrival, and he hasn’t thought of it, really. 

So he lets it charge while the match wraps up, while Reilly clears away their paper plates and empty beer bottles. Going upstairs feels like a marathon, but crossing the finish line only means he has to pick up his phone and see 80% blinking back at him. He swipes the unlock.

There’s hundreds of text messages. He doesn’t even open his inbox, just stares at the little number in red and white, and for some reason it’s better to hit voicemail instead. According to the automated voice, he has twenty-seven new voice messages, and before he has a moment to breathe or go get a drink or find something to hold onto, it plays the first.

He hasn’t heard Paul’s voice in a while. Niall almost drops his phone with how close it sounds, manages to keep it against his ear as he scrambles onto the bed, and his stomach plummets at the way he’s still giving instructions, reminding Niall not to leave anything behind and to be at the lobby on time for breakfast before the car’s there to take them to the airport. The second message begins straight after, and it’s a female voice this time, damp with tears, frantically calling his name—

He drops the phone on the bed and wraps his arms around his legs, drawn up to his chest.

;

It’s a Friday morning when he wakes up. His phone informs him of this, stubbornly still-charged when he wakes up and it’s digging into his ribs. 

He tells himself he has to eat something and take his medicine before he can go out. There’s bread in a basket on the counter, and a jar of preserves in the fridge, and he spreads a thin layer over a raw slice of whole wheat. But he gets itchy standing in the kitchen; there’s something weird about the light over the sink, and the flickering makes him feel anxious, so he decides he can eat on the way, leaving the preserves out in his hurry to get out the door.

Sitting on his piece of driftwood and squinting his eyes against the salty wind, Niall pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps his text inbox open. Taking a deep breath, he taps on Sean’s name—he doesn’t bother scrolling to the first message he missed, just reads from bottom to top, like Sean has gone from missing him and worrying about him and wishing him the best to frantically praying for him and his family. It’s similar with Josh, going from taking time off to spend with his family to offering Niall a place to stay to asking if there’s a holdup on the highway and warning that they’ll miss the flight.

The flight. Niall wonders if the flight was cancelled, feels awfully selfish even as he sorts through the little knowledge he’s picked up about airlines and protocol and self-importance.

There’s one from Justin, even, just a simple _here for you bro_ and it makes him smile, but fuck, it hurts.

He reads down the list of conversations but stops short of the last ones—or what he assumes are the last ones, anyway—in fear of reaching those that don’t have new messages.

It feels like a labor of Hercules to scroll back to the top, to click on Sean’s name one more time. He doesn’t know what to type, so he just says _hey_ , and then wishes he could take it back, because that’s stupid. 

He ends up sending the same thing to Josh, too.

;

It turns into Christmas before Niall is ready. 

There’s snow on the beach, and the windows all go textured with frost. Reilly teaches him how to lay a good fire in the fireplaces, and Niall doesn’t think to ask if he has family to visit, and Reilly doesn’t say. 

They have cinnamon rolls from a can, the morning that Niall wakes up and his phone tells him it’s Christmas Eve. They taste a little like cardboard, and Niall doesn’t keep it to himself. Reilly laughs, but it’s the kind of laugh that understands it wasn’t really a joke. 

A parcel from his mum comes in with chocolates and a forest green cabled jumper that he shrugs on over a t-shirt. Standing in the foyer, Niall points at a stack of envelopes on the seat of the hall tree, and Reilly shrugs. “Been comin’ in since last week, got your name on ‘em.”

Niall takes the stack and his mum’s chocolates and drags a blanket to the drawing room, sits under the piano and spreads the envelopes out on the floor face down, picks the first one, an off-white square, at random.

Luckily, it’s only a generic _Our thoughts are with you this holiday season_ with a picture of a polar bear and a stamp beneath the text that says it’s from Modest! Management. Niall decides to make two piles, and that one is a solid base for the “to burn” group.

After that, it’s like Russian Roulette: there are innocuous company greeting cards and photos of his cousins interspersed with Perrie’s monogrammed stationery and a plain silver card from Ruth and Nicola with a large smudge at the corner that looks suspiciously like water damage. Niall hopes it was the dog, and then doesn’t.

One of the lighter envelopes is from Ant, and Niall stuffs a truffle in his mouth before picking it open carefully. It’s just notebook paper, carefully folded up, but Niall can tell that it’s been smoothed out, wrinkles still obvious behind the smooth lines of the drawing in black ink, teeth lining the edges where it was torn free. He doesn’t quite get it until he finds the post-it note, still stuck to the inside of the envelope. _figured you’d be the only one to appreciate this_ - _anthony_

Niall wishes he’d thought to pull out a bottle of Scotch for this, but it’s too late now. 

He sets the letter from Ant down in his lap and grabs the rest of them, rips the envelopes and pulls them out, one by one, like bandaids. Jay and the girls smile up at him, bittersweet, from a glossy photocard, careful hand script reminding him that they _love him very much, sweets._ The note from his father isn’t very long, but he has trouble getting past the first sentence. Niall pushes another truffle into his mouth against a sob, and there’s Paul and Clodagh, their two kids and Clo’s large baby bump (did Niall know that? did he miss that? he doesn’t remember) in front of their Christmas tree. Paul looks so very old, and Niall flicks the photo away. 

There’s nothing from the Maliks. 

Niall even looks twice.

;

He sleeps under the piano for two days. 

Reilly doesn’t even come near the drawing room.

It’s Boxing Day when Niall finally reaches the kitchen. He feels ten pounds lighter, ten years older, but maybe it’s just now catching up to him. 

He slumps into a kitchen chair, and Reilly sets what was probably his own plate of beans on toast down in front of him. He doesn’t say anything, but Niall wants him to, for the first time. “Did I get any calls?” he asks.

Reilly pushes the jug of milk across the table at him. “One from a Miss Cox, actually. Said she’d try again.”

It doesn’t make Niall feel any better, but he’s glad he knows, anyway. 

“Thanks,” he says.

Reilly is standing in his staircase, and he gives Niall a small smile. “Not a word, Horan,” he says. “No need.”

;

It’s not Anne who calls him back. 

Niall reads _Gemma_ across his phone and loses his breath. He’s been sorting through records on the floor in the drawing room like he can’t stay away, and it’s late afternoon, almost New Years’. He’s not sure why he brought his phone downstairs with him, is relatively sure it’s a habit he hasn’t gone back to, but it’s definitely there, ringing and buzzing and jittering across the floor beside his knee. 

And he doesn’t want to pick up, but he does, because she deserves that more than his selfishness. 

“H’lo,” he says, and it comes out steady, mocking his frantic heart.

“Hey,” Harry’s sister breathes, “Mum said you didn’t answer your house, so I thought I’d try this but I wasn’t sure if you disconnected—but you did! Didn’t. Hi, I’m sorry, am I bothering you?”

It’s nothing like talking to Harry, but Niall thinks he might die if she hangs up. “No,” he says, honestly. “No, I’m—I’ve not got anything to do, really.”

“Oh.” Gemma seems momentarily stumped by that, but then she takes another deep breath. “I wasn’t sure if I should call—” and there it is, now she sounds like Harry, words slowing down, voice going careful.

“Are you okay?” Niall asks, because that’s something he hadn’t even considered.

“Ha,” Gemma says, “Ha, yes, fine. Well. You know. Which is why I’m calling, I guess.”

Niall _doesn’t_ know what she means, but just listening to her is enough, right now. It’s something, anyway, familiar like even the smiling faces on the Christmas cards weren’t. 

And then it goes awry faster than he could’ve anticipated. “Listen, Niall, we’re... I know you don’t want to hear it, but we’ve all been so worried about you, and it hurt all of us, ‘course it did—” she breaks off to take a deep breath, and her voice comes back steadier, now, “but it’s _nothing_ compared to what you must be feeling, love, and... And we’re here, okay? All of us, even if you don’t want us here now, we’re all thinking of you.” She’s rambling, and Niall can’t hang up, and the way she’d started sounding like Harry is only getting worse, “No matter what you may tell yourself, Niall, the —it wasn’t your fault, yeah? There’s nothing you could’ve done, and the boys, they would’ve wanted you to be happy. You always did make them smile more than anyone else.”

Niall very slowly draws his knees up under his chin and lays himself down on the cold floor. “Yeah,” he says, “I know.” Always has, really. His throat hurts, and the floor is suddenly wet under his cheek. 

They stay on the line for a long time.

Niall can tell when she’s about to hang up. His face feels stiff, and for the first time he notices the papercuts on his knuckles from opening the Christmas cards. It seems like a long time ago, but maybe he just doesn’t heal as fast anymore. 

“Niall,” Gemma says, “are you still there?”

Niall snorts, coughs a little on it. “Still here,” he says. 

“They’ve finally sold Harry and Lou’s house,” Gemma says, softly. “They signed the papers on the twenty-third, and we got the last of it out on—anyhow, there’s a box of—” her voice goes funny, sharp. “There’s a box of _absolute shit_ that they had in their drawers, and mum and I can’t really —it doesn’t mean anything to us, not like it would to you.” 

Niall spreads his legs and arms to feel as much of the cold floor beneath him as he can. “I’ll text you th’address, then,” he says.

He thinks that maybe she nods. “Right,” she says. “I should go.” 

Niall doesn’t tell her not to.

;

It’s morning and they’re in a rental car headed to Charles de Gaulle.

Harry’s dozing against Liam’s arm, and Louis and Zayn are joking around in the back. Zayn’s oddly awake considering the hour, cheerful after a cup of good coffee, and he’s looking through one of the pockets in his backpack for his pack and lighter—Paul’s promised him a smoke break before they have to go through security and he’s not about to let the opportunity slip. He catches Niall’s eye between the headrests and grins, canines sharp in the goofy quirk of his face. 

Niall could’ve taken one of the back seats, but he’s always liked Paris, the streets and the buildings and the people, so he’s sat up front with the driver, a polite French man full of smiles and broken English that he punctuates with French expletives and a shake of his fist at other drivers.

“Paul’s just texted me three times about how we’re going to be late,” Liam laughs, and holds up his phone. 

“Tell him we’re enjoying the scenery,” Louis calls, gestures to the traffic that’s building as they approach the Arc De Triomphe, and then, dramatically, to Harry, who is rearranging his headband under his beanie but flashes Louis a mellow smile. 

Liam hunches in his seat, apparently doing just that, and Niall twists to look at Zayn again. He’s sucking on the tip of an unlit cigarette now, and he grimaces at Niall when he rolls his eyes. 

The driver says something—

Niall wishes he could remember what it was. 

;

There’s a noise, different than the one in his dream. He’s sweating, curled up in a ball next to the piano with his phone in his hand, and it sounds like something has fallen over. It’s a dull thump, like it’s stories up, in the attic. It’s still dark outside, and even if Niall knew where they keep the torches, he wouldn’t go up to the attic to investigate. Not on his own, anyway.

He climbs to his room in the dark with a hand on the bannister and takes a shower. After, he puts the jumper his mum sent him back on, with a pair of sweats that fall off his hips unless he pulls the drawstrings tight and ties them. Niall shoves a pillow against his back, times his breathing and stares out the east-facing window, falling asleep just as the sky starts turning purple.

;

In the afternoon, he walks outside with an apple from the kitchen between his cold fingers, finds himself at the gatehouse. It’s warm inside and he flicks the light on, looks down the line of red and blue and black and gunmetal, his sad little collection that’s only his because he was too selfish to let them go to anyone else.

It’s too hard to look at Zayn’s Mini for too long, so he walks past it, trails his apple-sticky fingers over the shiny blue hood as he marches by. He clicks his fingers against the headlights of Louis’ Range Rover, then Harry’s, a matched set. 

He ends up stepping in between Harry’s Audi and his Jaguar, a sleek, smart little thing in red that’s shinier than what’s left of the apple’s skin, still in his hand. The black top is up, and he doesn’t stop to look in the window before he pulls the door open and sits in the passenger seat, smells the sunlight and cologne and leather and it makes his eyes sting. He leans his head back against the seat and inhales.

By the time he leaves the gatehouse, he’s carrying a palmful of candy wrappers, a dried and shriveled banana peel, a coat too small for Harry’s shoulders, and an orange beanie.

He wears the hat to dinner, even after Reilly gives him a look of not quite disapproval, but something close to it. He takes his medicine, and the stairs, and his knee doesn’t really think much of one or the other.

He’s pulling a worn raglan over his head when he hears the noise, a steady tapping from the attic above his room, and stops. Maybe Reilly’s gone upstairs to check something, he thinks, feeling the excuse come to him slow like syrup. Maybe there are squirrels nesting above his ceiling. 

Maybe, but Niall somehow doubts it. 

He crosses the floor and opens his door, leaves it cracked as he moves back to the dresser. He’d finally sorted out his underwear into the top drawer, and now he digs to the back, rubs thin grey jersey between his fingertips. But in the end he pulls out a pair of his own, plain white, worn out elastic.

The plaid pyjama bottoms are long on him, drag under his heels as he crawls into bed.

The noises don’t stop, and Niall thinks about Zayn tapping at the ceiling of his bunk when everyone else was asleep, thinks about a secret language built out of private smiles and quick looks, casual touches too sneaky to catch. He wonders why of all the things he’s collected, the detritus of their lives, there’s so _little_ of Zayn left. 

He’s afraid of the answer like he is of the crack in his door, but he closes his eyes and goes to sleep anyway.

;

A few days later, it’s uncharacteristically mild for Ireland in January, which means it’s still freezing cold, but Niall’s fingers don’t quite feel like he could snap them off. He wears the orange beanie and a hoodie and a coat, his own this time, and heads down to the beach. It’s hard to tread through the snow and the sand, but he takes off his shoes at the edge of the heather stalks and folds his coat over them. There’s no wind, down at the surf, and he stands with his feet turning red and numb in the bubbling waves for a long time. 

It’s an accident, when he’s caught off-guard with a larger wave; it hits just under his knees, and it’s cold, but not as cold as he would’ve thought. It feels cleaner than his showers ever do, these days, like the winter and the salt could wash some things away easier than his glass-stalled shower and expensive soap. 

The wave pulls back and tugs Niall with it, his knee locking up and making him stumble forward to meet the next dip of the ocean. 

After that it’s too easy to keep going, until it’s up to his chest and he can barely breathe, but his head feels clearer than it has in months. The surf is roaring down the shore, and it’s like applause, ringing in his ears. His knee doesn’t hurt, like this, doesn’t feel at all. Niall knows he’s shaking, knows his lips are probably blue and his nose is red, but he stays, lets himself be rocked by the ocean. 

He’s just thinking he should go, maybe—his teeth are chattering, and he’s strangely sleepy—when he hears the tell-tale inhale of an incoming wave and the water around him lowers beneath his collarbones and by the time he tries to turn away it’s too late. The wave drags him under.

For a moment this is nice too, the split-second after his head goes under and before the salt water stings his eyes, and he looks up and sees the sky so wide above him, through dark water. And then he thinks, _no_ , _nonono_ , because this is not the way he wants this to end: not alone, not shaking so hard he might slip out of his skin. 

He’s fine. He knows better than to panic, bows his back and presses his arms out against the weight of the ocean, instead, pushes up and nothing happens, and he does it again, and again.

He’s still not afraid, not until the first bubbles escape his mouth and his lungs clench up, and there’s an icy hand on his shoulder and Niall is suddenly and absolutely _terrified_ by a fear not entirely his own. 

He comes to the surface choking, mouth and nose and eyes and ears burning with saltwater, and he can’t see the shore; it appears, suddenly, sneaking up on him just like the waves had, and there’s suddenly sand under his feet. His knees give out, and he washes up on the beach like his driftwood. 

;

“I know,” he says, when Reilly is boiling water for hot chocolate and not glaring at him. He’s wrapped up in an old dressing gown Reilly dug out from the linen closet upstairs and a feather duvet and settled in a chair at the kitchen table. “I wasn’t trying t’do anythin’.”

Reilly grunts, sets a mug down in front of him and leans against the table, watching him drink it. 

He carries Niall up the stairs to his bedroom, that night, against Niall’s protests, and tucks him into bed like a small child, leaves the bathroom light on like he might be scared of the dark. Niall doesn’t get up to turn it off.

;

He’s not really surprised when he wakes up after noon the following day, head pounding and nose all stuffed up. Reilly seems to have predicted it; Niall lies in bed staring at the canopy and feeling pitiful for maybe ten minutes, and then there’s a knock at the door.

“Yeah,” he croaks, and Reilly nudges the door open with his shoulder, carrying a tray. Niall sits up with some effort. His chest feels tight and his knee is throbbing mercilessly. He winces.

“Don’t make this a habit,” Reilly says, setting down the tray with the neatly arranged bowl of chicken soup, glass of orange juice, and two blue pills, along with Niall’s pain medication, on his lap.

“Reilly,” Niall says, just before he reaches the door, and Reilly turns to look at him. “Can ya get me some of the boxes from upstairs?”

Reilly looks at him for a second. It’s barely a hesitation, and then he nods. “If y’like.” 

;

Niall doesn’t think much of the screech, like pushing furniture, he hears from the attic, even though Reilly’s already brought him the boxes.

He’s got two of them on the foot of his bed, and he’s been digging through the paper and bubble wrap impatiently for the last hour. He’s not looking for anything, he doesn’t think. But now that he has them, he’s got to open them, and it’s easier to do it quickly, business-like. 

The first box is all awards, the half-unwrapped Brit and the KCA and the beautiful, stupid VMAs. He turns the moonmen over and over in his hands, and they feel cool, enough like the ocean to make him shiver and put them down in the comforter and keep going.

The second has the few framed pictures he’d had in London, and he unwraps those without looking, lines them up face-down next to the awards on the massive bed.

;

Three days later, he’s wearing a snapback that isn’t his when Reilly brings him a box with a shipping label at the top. It’s from Gemma.

He’s been tuning the guitars in the library, but he sets the last one back on the stand and takes the box upstairs to his bedroom. It’s not too heavy, and he can handle it even with his knee, the limp that’s grown more pronounced since his adventure in the ocean. On second thought, though, he makes his way down the hall to the largest of the guest bedrooms, sets it down carefully on the four-poster bed. 

It really is all shit. There’s some of the useless knick-knacks Louis was into buying, or at times stealing, when they went to new places, and a few postcards from a short-lived phase which Harry went through when they were starting out and he wanted to document everything. There’s a few envelopes with letters from fans, and a couple of CDs, and a grey beanie, and then a few things Niall sets in a separate pile; a matchbook from an Italian restaurant in Manchester with a familiar name, and a music festival flyer, and a key-card from Courchevel.

He finds places for everything in the room, and tells himself he’s imagining it when the curtains shift at the corner of his eye. The windows are all closed.

;

Slowly, the house fills up. 

Niall lines up Liam’s shoes under the bed in one of the guest rooms; there’s not a big enough closet, and he still ends up with a few pairs set in the windowsill. It’s not a complete collection. Some of them had gone to the girls, although Niall’s not sure what they wanted them for. Not that he’s judging, it’s not like he’s going to use them, either, if anyone’s being technical. Management had mentioned doing an auction for charity, but Niall hadn’t signed those papers, hadn’t given them the satisfaction of reading past the first line.

It’s the same with Louis’ headphones. It was a stupid thing to make an issue of, but Niall hadn’t let them be thrown out, even though most of them are missing the earpieces or the wires are frayed at the jack. Now, he coils them each up, organizes them in an inane rainbow grid of colors in a drawer in the larger of the guest rooms. 

The awards end up scattered all over the house. It’s mostly whenever Niall sees an empty space; there’s a KCA blimp on the sink in the downstairs bathroom under the stairs, and a Brit stuck on the mantel in the drawing room next to an old clock that Niall has no idea how to wind. There’s a plaque for their first million sold that he props on a bookcase in the library next to Faust, and there’s a little framed photo of the five of them at the VMAs that he waffles over for ages before finally sticking it on a bedside table in the unclaimed bedroom. 

There are some things he didn’t get, of course, things the families wanted or that the boys would’ve wanted to go to friends. Liam’s turtles go to live with Danielle permanently, and Niall doesn’t have a problem with that because what the fuck would he want with turtles, honestly. He’s sentimental in his own way, but that way does not extend to cannibalistic reptiles. Zayn’s Bentley stays with Danny, because it was always for him anyhow; Louis’ strange gearhead devices go to the Tomlinsons and get sold. 

There’s still a lot that comes with Niall. He thinks that it’s ironic, that the house has more detritus than the beach ever does. 

;

There’s a Friday when he decides to finally sort out the records that he abandoned after Christmas and Gemma’s phone call, and he’s got a beer in one hand as he flips through the stacks with the other. Some of them belong to the house, Edith Piaf and the London Philharmonic, one single with a French name he can’t pronounce, “Si tu n’étais pas là”, but some were Harry and Zayn’s. Niall goes slower, through these; Elvis he keeps out, and a Johnny and June LP he’s never listened to before, but he shifts Drake to the back of the stacks. Niall can’t quite forget the night he spent on top of, and then under, the piano, the murky memories of sharpie on his skin and ringing in his ears.

Christmas seems like a lifetime ago, and everything that came before seems an eon past. Niall doesn’t want to dig too deep, even though he knows that he’s building himself a tower, instead, brick by brick of memories in plain sight. He can’t justify even to himself how there are some things he can deal with, and some he just can’t. He wonders if that’s what they mean by “dealing,” if it’s normal to be so irrational when you pick and choose the things you keep and the things you... don’t. 

If he’ll always wear their sweatpants to bed but be unable to meet their eyes in pictures.

;

The noises never stop. 

They lessen, over time, like Niall’s mind is better at ignoring them or less interested in manufacturing them. He’s not sure which it is, not sure which is worse or better or more healthy. He stopped taking the pain meds after his bout in the ocean, after he got over the cold that had him bed-bound until Reilly rolled his eyes and told him to get his arse downstairs if he wanted food. His knee hurts worse but at least there’s no chance that he’s... whatever that would mean. 

He’s stopped pretending that the castle is not so much house as it is museum. Niall isn’t sure who he thought he could fool; their families all know, the papers have probably run amuck with it by now. There’s no way he could have everything shipped over without someone noticing. He thinks about looking online, wonders what headlines they’ve chosen. _Niall Horan Packs Up Bandmates’ Belongings, Creates Shrine to Denial._  Denial, which, they’ve probably made some unfunny pun about it. 

At the same time, nobody can really know the extent of it, either. There’s a strange comfort to that; the knowledge that whatever anyone might say, they have no idea. 

Reilly is the only one who knows, and he’s not saying. He brings the boxes down from the attic, one by one, when Niall asks, and he sets out a feather duster and old rags and canned air for when Niall needs to clean things up, and he doesn’t ask if Niall wants help. Niall finds that he trusts him, in a way he thought he’d forgotten how to.

So the papers, the PR team, the millions of fans that probably still follow their twitters, they can all be damned.

Niall lives alone in a big castle by the ocean, with his skeletons and his ghosts. He probably always will. 


	2. part two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings** : depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, irresponsible use of medication and inappropriate mixing with alcohol but no abuse, consideration of mental issues, use of medicinal marijuana, disordered eating (as a symptom/consequence of PTSD). Additional warnings containing spoilers in the end notes. 
> 
> “Never On Your Own” begins in the fall of 2012, just after the boys’ press tour in Europe. It’s canon compliant up until that point, and to our knowledge up until that point. (The LIC is shamefully absent simply because we didn’t know enough about them in fall of 2012. Also because if they were included there’s no way they’d let Niall be angsty aka like 90% of this plot. Additionally, our Niall drives even though in canon, he hadn’t got his license yet. And medicinal marijuana is legal in our Ireland. /artistic liberties).
> 
> Title from Don’t Forget Where You Belong by One Direction. Accompanying fanmix by lilourry here. (We’re sorry in advance.)

On the morning where Niall has to stop halfway through the kitchen to rub at his knee for a solid minute, Reilly waits for him to reach his seat and peer gloomily at the eggs on toast and sausages on his plate before looking away from his paper.

“You’d be able t’walk better if you took ‘em,” he points out, gesturing at the abandoned pill bottles on the counter next to the fruit basket. It’s not an order, or even much of a suggestion, but exactly the sort of loaded observation that, Niall has found, Reilly is an expert at making.

“Guess so,” Niall mumbles, filling his mouth with toast before Reilly can stare him into saying more.

Still, he stares back at Reilly and Reilly doesn’t look at him, but very deliberately glances at the list of names stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. Niall looks, of course. They’re missed calls, he assumes, and doesn’t need to get close to guess at the names, Jay and Gemma and his dad and his mother, the last of which has a set of passive aggressive tally marks in a thick stroke next to it.

They finish their breakfast silently, and Niall goes back to his room very slowly, cursing the bloody lift the castle doesn’t have.

;

He gets a text message, the following day, from a number that someone else must’ve programmed in his contacts, an ominous “MM” followed by initials he doesn’t bother reading. There’s an address, and a short sentence informing him that there’s something extra available for him for medicinal purposes, should he desire to use it, and that he can go by to pick it up at any time. 

_Well, shit,_ Niall thinks, and he has absolutely nothing to lose or worry about —the neat, excessive digits in the bank statements he so dreads coming to mind—so he tugs on the jumper his mother sent, pops a snapback on his head, and collects his keys and wallet from the dresser. 

The drive into town is quiet, and the address leads him to a nondescript building with a simple sign over the door that reads “Specialty Pharmacy”. Rubbing his knee before getting off the car, Niall makes his way in through the glass door.

He leans heavily on the counter and digs out his ID to show the pharmacist. She nods and it takes a minute, but she comes back with a little baggie and hands it over; “Don’t you need my card?” Niall starts, but she shakes her head. “Your people already paid.”

Niall sighs. It feels like it always did, like he’s living a life they’ve plotted out for him without asking.

“Is there anything else?” she asks.

“No,” Niall says, but his knee is throbbing and he’s not moving away. “Yes. I—the side effects on this are... There wouldn’t be any... hallucinations, or like, phantom noises or, like, that sort?”

He knows it’s a mistake when her eyes go soft, and she purses her lips, fiddles her hands in the pocket of her apron. “No,” she says, kindly, “no, not with this.”

“Okay,” Niall says. He doesn’t bother telling her he was _just wondering_. Doesn’t correct what she’s probably thinking, that he hears their voices and sees them in his dreams. He does, but not like she thinks. Not like that.

;

Zayn is fever hot, pressed tight up against Niall’s side. They’re sharing one of the hotel room’s two double beds, and there’s still too much room, so they’re stealing each other’s space instead. Niall thinks he might suffocate, but he can’t make his mouth work to say, so instead he watches Zayn’s lips moving, tries to make words out of the shapes. He can read _fuck_ and _Niall_ , but there are some he doesn’t think are English at all. He tries them out anyway, just sounds to him, but sounds that make Zayn tremble when Niall presses them into his throat. Niall thinks that he likes this, that he doesn’t have to know what it means, when it’s Zayn. Niall thinks he’d like to tell Zayn he loves him, so he does. Zayn always says it back, but he doesn’t, this time, only looks up at Niall and his eyes are so wide, like it’s new, like it’s the first time he’s heard it. “What?” Niall says, and Zayn shakes his head, says, “Nothing, just. Do you really?”

Niall doesn’t remember what he says, then.

Whatever it is, it makes Zayn smile, crinkling his eyes and scrunching his nose, and he scoots down the bed until all Niall can see is his dark, feathered hair, the line of his nose and the bow of his lips. Zayn’s mouth is hotter than his hands, and Niall doesn’t want to close his eyes, doesn’t want to close his eyes, knows that if he does...

Zayn looks up at him, and.

Niall jerks upright in his bed. He’s wet with sweat and everything is too hot, too cold. He can’t stop shaking. The mess in his sweats is still warm, sticky in his leg hair and wet down his thighs. Niall wants to cry but can’t, quite.

He doesn’t wait for his legs to stop shaking before he’s climbing out of bed and hobbling to the bathroom. The light flickers when he flips the switch, goes steady when he hits the switch plate with his fist. The anger leaves as quickly as it came, like it wasn’t his at all, just some passing feeling that fades away and leaves him winded, sagging against the counter. Niall cleans up slowly, not bothering to warm the water for a flannel, just wiping himself down with the cold that springs to life from the tap.

He shivers, making his way to his dresser in the dark, just with his t-shirt on. This time he takes out the grey shorts from the back of the drawer, and they’re a little... they fit weird, but they’re not supposed to be his.

He doesn’t bother stripping the sheets off the bed. He _can’t_ bother with that, so he counts his losses and makes his way down the hallway to the empty guest bedroom, the guest bedroom that’s not really empty at all.

The bed is piled with boxes and bags, opened and strewn across the comforter haphazardly, but Niall doesn’t want the bed. He settles in the armchair by the window, draws up his legs, and waits the night out.

;

The days settle into a pattern. Niall wakes up, gets dressed, eats breakfast, goes down to the beach, comes back to the house, has dinner, goes to bed.

He wakes up, eats breakfast, takes his medication, opens boxes, cleans his guitars. Arranges stray tidbits in the spare rooms. Has dinner, goes to bed.

And then there’s a day when Niall wakes up, goes to his closet, and...

And the kelly green snapback with his name embroidered in white above the brim isn’t there.

It’s a testament to how well he’s gotten to know every single item he keeps in his closet and exactly where it should be that it’s the first thing he notices when he flips the switch on. It sat on the top shelf at the far left corner of the monstrous walk-in closet, between his Chicago Bulls and  Toronto Bluejays hats, and now it doesn’t. He would’ve _heard_ Reilly or the housekeepers come in, and none of them ever come near his closet at all, lay out his clean, folded laundry on the bed rather than putting it away for him.

He’s not keeping count, but it’s been a week since Niall’s heard sounds.

It’s not like it matters. The hat was a gift from overzealous promoters at a signing on Saint Paddy’s Day, he thinks, or equally excitable fans during one of their first trips to America, or something. He doesn’t even remember, it’s that unimportant. Niall pushes it to the back of his mind.

The grandfather clock in the hall tells him it’s just gone noon, and the note on the kitchen counter says Reilly’s out and will be back late, but there’s dinner in the refrigerator. Niall makes a sandwich to keep himself occupied, and chews through exactly two bites before picking up his plate and making his way out to the drawing room.

He’s not _looking_ for the hat so much as he’s... exploring the house curiously, and keeping an eye out for misplaced objects. It’s not like he has anything better to do, he tells himself as he walks out of the posh sitting room and into the library. Surely the library.

He leaves his empty plate on a desk in the library and comes out with a cool-looking fountain pen that he puts in his hoodie pouch, thumbing at the smooth sides of it absentmindedly.

The damn hat isn’t anywhere downstairs. He hasn’t even worn it; literally took it out of its box with his other hats and set it on the shelf and was only aware of it at the corner of his eye because it was so brightly colored, and he has no idea why it suddenly _bothers_ him so much to have lost a stupid fucking hat. He sits on the landing halfway up the stairs with his back against the polished bannister and frowns to himself, listens intently for a moment like the castle might tell him how it sprouted legs and wandered off.

With a deep breath and considerable effort from his functional limbs as he tries not to let too much of his weight rest on his bum knee, Niall gets himself back on his feet and makes his way through the rooms upstairs. The hat isn’t in the study or the useless sitting rooms full of old furniture and heavy curtains that Niall hasn’t even ventured into. _“Not been any use for ‘em in a while,” indeed_ , he thinks, remembering Reilly’s first tour of the house. He wonders for the first time if there are secret passages, wonders why he never thought of that and then dismisses it because really, what would he do with a secret passage, anyhow.

The hat isn’t in the first guest room among Liam’s shoes, or in the second, bigger one with Harry’s postcards and Louis’ headphones. Niall stalls as he runs out of places to look, trails his fingertips over the surface of a dresser and down the glass curve of a People’s Choice Award, but doesn’t open the top drawer where he tucked away a set of matching festival bracelets and that French resort key-card.

It’s not in the third room, either, but he traces the edges of the drawing Ant sent him for Christmas where it’s tucked into the corner of the vanity mirror and warily eyes a pair of worn Doc Martens beneath the window. He may be considering putting the boots on and giving up on the hat when he remembers that it’s not the last place he can look. 

It’s been niggling in the back of his mind for some time, and Niall will admit that, though he doesn’t want to think about why. He tries _not_ to think about it as he wrestles the sticky hinge of the door at the end of the hall open, braces his hands on the walls at either side and begins the climb to the attic.

He’s never gone up to the attic, not in the months that he’s had Reilly hide away all the hurtful things there, not in the months that he’s had Reilly bring all those things back. It feels like inevitability, and fate, and a lot of things Niall hasn’t believed in since there were four other people to bear the weight of such words with him. 

He reaches the top of the stairs, winded, and has to swivel around the bannister to look out across the expanse of the attic. It’s dim, cold light filtered through dusty garret windows and a single skylight that slices the old sofa in two with a beam of late winter afternoon sun, settled in the middle of it all, amid the wreckage of furniture that hasn’t been used in decades and boxes Niall hasn’t gotten to yet. Niall looks around and then... and then back.

Back, because his hat is right there, on Harry’s head, knocked a bit askew where his temple is smushed against Louis’ shoulder. He did always really like sprawling, and by the looks of it Liam is doing nothing to stop him, has a hand circled around Harry’s ankle where it rests on his thigh. Zayn’s perched on the back of the sofa behind Louis, and he’s the first to look up at Niall. He nudges Harry’s shoulder with his knee, and Harry’s chin jerks up, smile slow but brighter than the sunbeams through the skylight that make them look washed-out and worn thin.

“You stole _my_ hats,” Harry explains, sheepishly.

Niall looks between them and his throat is dry. “That’s not yours,” he says automatically, even though it hurts like he hasn’t spoken at all in days, weeks, months, like he’s forgotten how. It’s not. _He_ was given that snapback, not Harry. It’s got his name on it. “You —they gave you that dumb track jacket, that day; the snapback’s mine.”

Harry frowns. “I adopted it. Liam went through all the trouble of getting it for me, and now it’s _mine_.”

“You do have to admit he looks good in it,” Louis points out from his spot leaning against the armrest. Zayn nods.

“You’re not _real_ ,” Niall says, weakly, even though he took his medicine, even though hallucinations are _not a side effect_. 

They _do_ look good, all of them; not just Harry in his stolen snapback. They don’t look... quite _right_ , but they look good, like he remembers and not like the pictures that he’s turned face down, the fake smiles and the way celluloid and ink could never quite capture all the ways they touched. They’re piled up like they’re waiting for an interview to start, edges gone soft and overlapping, and it should be strange but it isn’t, like Niall can see the way they fit better like this than he could before.

“I took my meds,” he repeats, and blinks, rubs at his eyes. Zayn flickers; just for a moment, barely noticeable, but doesn’t disappear.

“You did, Nialler,” Liam says, quiet. “I saw you.”

“I don’t...” Niall shakes his head. They look _so good_. He sticks his hands in his pockets, too afraid that he might do something stupid and overdramatic, like take a running start, reach out, try to touch. He knows how this goes, in movies. He finds himself stepping forward anyway, moving around a box and stepping over a pile of curtain rods, feet like cement but lighter than he’s felt in months.

“I told you we shouldn’t have startled him,” Liam says, rubbing his hands together, glancing over at Louis disapprovingly. Harry sits up and folds his hands in his lap.

Louis rolls his eyes, and Niall remembers wanting to kiss him like a visceral punch. “Oh,” Louis nods, “and how would we _not_ startle him, Liam?”

Niall would almost think this is a conversation that they’ve had before, except that. “Why?” he says, “Why am I, why is this, you—”

“This was a horrible idea,” Zayn huffs, and when he goes to get up, his foot goes through the floorboard, just as if it’d been quicksand, or water, or. Not solid wood.

“Shit,” Liam says, gets up and reaches for Zayn’s leg, but Zayn jerks away, falling against the chest of drawers behind him. Bits of him are still... wavering, his hand sinking into the counter of the chest when he tries to steady himself.

“I’ve _got_ it,” he hisses, and Niall is torn between scrubbing a hand over his face and never, ever blinking again, in fear of opening his eyes and finding them gone.

“Nialler,” Harry says, sweetly, “you look a bit pale.”

“So do you,” Niall points out, and Harry reaches up, lifts the hat off his head by the brim in concession. It catches Niall in the stomach before he processes that Harry’s throwing it to him, leaves him scrambling to pick it up off the floor.

Liam frowns at him. “I thought we said we would be _gentle_ , Harry.”

“Think that’s already fucked,” Zayn says. He’s pulled himself onto the chest of drawers and drawn his knees up, is mostly on top of the counter rather than _in_ it.

“I think for a first, this meeting’s going great, lads,” Louis chirps happily. Niall is still turning the hat in his hands over and over, tracing the brim with his fingertips, the embroidered white letters at the front.

Harry nods, leans his head onto Louis’ shoulder, pets at his knee. Niall has to look back down at the hat because it’s a little too familiar, aches a little too much, that even in his subconscious they’re this comfortable.

“We’re not—” Zayn’s louder than before, and his voice sounds tight. He meets Niall’s eyes for the first time. “We’re not in your head, Niall.”

Niall can’t look at him too long. He has the same scruff he did all those months ago in Paris. “How’d you—”

“We’re real,” Zayn interrupts, hopping off the counter. This time his feet land _on_ the floorboards, not through them, and he takes four steady steps towards Niall, stops a foot in front of him, and holds up his hand.

It feels like it should be a bigger decision than it is for Niall to raise his head and a hand, too, right in front of Zayn’s. It’s like falling asleep on yourself and waking up tingling, or like being out in the snow and coming in to a warm fire and pressing your hand up just in front of the grate, like your skin is just coming back to life with feeling. Niall wants to cry or swear or laugh, and he does the latter, breathless in disbelief, in _relief_.

Zayn pulls away quickly, wiping his hand on his thigh, and turns around, moving back towards the sofa, piling on top of Liam and pressing his nose to his pale neck. Niall still has his hand out, and he slowly drops it, looking at the four of them.

“So,” Louis says, expectantly, and he’s squeezing Harry’s hand so hard that Niall can’t tell where his fingers end and Harry’s begin.

“So,” Niall says, clearing his throat. “D’you fancy joining me for dinner?”

;

Niall learns rather quickly that ghosts don’t eat, or breathe, or drink, or sleep. This doesn't, however, keep them from making a proper racket. He’s belatedly grateful that Reilly is still out, because the boys aren’t exactly quiet as they pile into the kitchen behind him.

Harry sits on the counter next to the fruit bowl and frowns at the bananas until Louis swoops by and kisses his cheek. Liam picks up things, hovering (not literally, at least not this time) close to Niall, and Niall only realizes that he’s showing off when a spatula almost goes through his hand and the creeping blush never shows across his cheeks, but Niall knows what it’d look like, anyway.

“So that’s what all the noise was about,” Niall hums, opening the refrigerator door.

“We had to practice,” Louis says. “Liam, heads up!” A spoon sails over Niall’s head.

“It took us a while to even like, be able to just touch stuff without going through it,” Harry supplies, very slowly, and carefully doesn’t glance back at Zayn leaning on the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest.

Niall hands Liam a plastic container with leftover green beans, which Liam holds in both hands, brows furrowed in concentration at first.

“What’s that feel like?” Niall gestures at Louis walking his fingers up Harry’s forearm. They share a look.

“Different,” Louis says, eyes dropping to his lap. Harry’s jaw is suddenly clenched. “I can feel we’re touching, but it’s like... when you’re out in the snow without gloves, all tingly, you know?”

“Yeah,” Niall says, quietly. He wishes he hadn’t asked. Wishes he didn’t know.

“Is that all you’re planning to eat?” Zayn speaks up for the first time since they’ve come downstairs, and he’s pointing at the green beans in Liam’s hands.

“Uh,” Niall says, intelligently.

“You’ve some lovely bananas,” Harry says, pinching the stem of a particularly long, golden specimen between two fingers. Niall hasn’t so much as noticed the bananas before now, but he nods, and tears the one Harry’s indicated free of the bunch. Niall wonders, glancing at Zayn, if he misses his cigarettes the way Harry craves fruit.

The clamor starts up again, Liam digging through the fridge now, although he has trouble with the seal of the door when it accidentally shuts and Niall has to open it for him. Louis has picked up two wooden spoons and turned a pot over, and he’s humming and tapping something that sounds suspiciously like Girls Aloud.

It’s strangely chaotic, for Niall being the only living soul in the house. Standing in his kitchen in old sweats and a t-shirt, surrounded by rowdy ghosts, he thinks the castle might feel like home for the first time.

;

He brings his food upstairs, to his bedroom, and the boys sit in a circle around him on the bed. It’s the first time they’ve really _seemed_ different, because none of them can really stay still. Niall thinks Louis is probably doing it on purpose, hovering inches above the duvet so he’s at Harry’s eye-level, cross-legged. Liam and Harry both drift when they laugh, like they can’t multitask the attention it takes to stay in one place. Zayn just wavers, bobbing like a little tousle-headed balloon at the foot of the bed, arms around his knees again. He looks strangely nervous.

They play a game, because it seems like the lads don’t have much to talk about for once.

“Can you walk through a closed door?” Niall asks, puts a forkful of green beans in his mouth, and before anyone can answer, Louis reaches for Harry’s right arm and taps his fingers just below the inside of his elbow, on his inner forearm.

“That’s clever, Lou,” Liam grins, nodding at the way Louis traces circles around the tattoo in stark contrast against Harry’s pale skin. _Things I can._

Niall smiles crookedly, rusty with disuse. “And you can float, obviously,” he continues mid-chew.

Harry’s fingers meet Louis’ on his right arm, tapping at _Things I can_ again.

“You can’t eat,” Niall confirms, next, taking another bite.

Liam reaches over to tap _Things I can’t_.

“‘m glad I can,” Niall mutters, not really thinking, and he wishes he could take it back when he looks up from his bowl to see all four of them staring at the bedspread.

“Me too, Nialler,” Liam says, after a beat, and gives him this sad sort of smile.

Suddenly Niall isn’t so hungry. He sets his bowl down in his lap.

“You could—” Harry heaves a tiny sigh. “You could at least eat the banana, couldn’t you? It’s just, it’ll go bad since you tore it from the bunch and it’d be such a shame to waste it.”

He looks so pitiful that Niall nods and picks up the banana, leaving the bowl in its place, and gives him a tight-lipped smile as he peels it.

“Louis,” Liam says, picking up his head, “can you hold a biro and write stuff out?”

It seems to cheer him up, and Harry by proxy, and he taps Harry’s right arm. “I’ve gotten quite good at that, Liam, thank you,” he announces in his proudest, airiest tone.

“We’ve all been working on skills,” Liam tells Niall. “Like, we’ve discovered we’re all good at different ghost things? And we’ve been trying to get better at them.”

Niall still has half a mouthful of banana when he asks, “Can you fly, like more than just the floaty thing?”

“Not very high,” Zayn speaks up from behind his knees, and sinks back down from halfway to the ceiling. “Harry’s pretty good at it. Right, Haz?”

Harry’s been distracted staring at the banana in Niall’s hand, but he nods and beams. “I try not to go too far, as there’s lots of wind outside and I don’t know if I’d blow away.”

Niall stares at him blankly. “That’s horrible.”

“Turns out there are a lot of worries for us,” Louis nods. “Like what happens if someone sits on us.”

“Oh jesus,” says Niall. “I haven’t, ever, have I?”

Louis holds his grim expression for about two seconds before cracking, falling backwards in a fit of giggles. He goes over the edge of the bed but they don’t hear a thump, and he’s wiping at his eyes out of habit as he floats back onto the bed. “Nah, mate, though it came close those times with Zayn—”

Zayn interrupts him by shoving him off the bed again, glares at Louis where he floats about three feet in the air, legs crossed.

Niall knows better than to ask which times, so he pops the end of the banana in his mouth and puts the peel on his nightstand next to his forgotten bowl of green beans. He tries to stifle a yawn as he settles back against his pillows, and Liam gives him a fond look.

“Wanna get some sleep, mate?” he prompts.

Niall frowns. When he thinks about it, he’d really rather not go to sleep, because he doesn’t know how long this will last, or if they’ll be there in the morning, or if they’re real at all.

“We won’t leave,” Louis says, quietly.

Harry nods. “We’ll even stay in here if you want us to, Niall.”

“Y’don’t sleep,” Niall hums. He can feel himself drifting, eyes growing heavy. It’s almost a relief, to feel properly sleepy rather than just exhausted for the first time in months. “Don’t you have like, your ghost lessons?”

“Always time for those later,” Zayn mutters, and Niall thinks muzzily that there’s something behind it, something more Zayn isn’t saying, but the boys are drifting closer, and Louis is humming something soft under his breath, and Harry is fluffing his pillow and Liam is tucking the duvet under his chin. Niall can ask Zayn about it... later.

;

Niall wakes up to the unmistakable smell of beans on toast. He doesn’t want to open his eyes, but there’s a weight in his lap that’s highly reminiscent of a breakfast tray, and his stomach betrays him, growling hungrily. He remembers, sleepily, having eaten only a banana the night before—

Niall squeezes his eyes shut. If he can just fall back asleep, he thinks, if he can just ease back into the dream.

“Sleeping beauty,” Louis sing-songs, just next to his ear, and Niall sits straight up, eyes flying open in spite of himself.

“ _Lou_ ,” Harry sighs, “now he’s spilled his juice.”

Looking between Harry, draped around the bedpost, and Louis, floating on his stomach, chin in his hands, next to his head, it takes Niall a moment to focus on how he has, in fact, spilled the tray’s glass of apple juice all over his duvet. “Ah, shit,” he breathes, belatedly, but he’s too glad for the company to really give a damn.

Liam comes in, skirting around the door and hovering behind Harry, looking expectant. “Well?” he asks.

“He just woke up,” Harry sighs, “Louis scared him.”

Liam manages to look both pleased and disapproving, and Niall isn’t sure why he’s surprised at that; Liam’s always managed those complicated sort of expressions with his eyebrows. It’s just that Niall’s not as used to seeing the hybrid expression on his face while he hovers two inches off the floor.

“Isn’t that in the job description, though? Zayn, back me up on this,” Louis insists. Niall scrubs a hand over his face, runs it through his hair for good measure. He hasn’t been a morning person in a while.

Zayn comes out of the bathroom, and he looks paler, in the morning light. “Sure,” he says. “Do you need more juice, Niall?”

“No, I’m... It’s fine,” he says dismissively, and looks down at the tray. Luckily the juice stayed off the plate. He turns to Liam and Harry. “D’you think y’can hold this so I can get the covers off the bed? I think I can feel it reaching me legs.”

Liam nods and lifts the tray off of Niall’s lap, and Harry flattens his palms beneath it for reinforcement as Niall kicks off the soaked comforter.

They settle it back in Niall’s lap when he nods, and the beans on his toast are lukewarm at best by now, but it still tastes good. Niall is acutely aware of the way they watch him eat, wide-eyed and sharp like hawks. He rolls his eyes. “‘s sorta creepy, lads.”

Zayn laughs. He’s tethered himself around the spindle of a bedpost, hair brushing the ceiling, and, as Niall watches, dipping through it, and his tattoos are so dark against the translucence of the rest of him that they look fresh again. Niall realizes it’s the first time he’s heard Zayn laugh in months. It’s not as comforting as it should be; Zayn’s face is twisted up like it hurts. Niall recognizes that look, but he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like not being able to wipe it away with his thumb, smoothing out the wrinkles in Zayn’s forehead with his fingertips, either. It’s worse, this way. Zayn says, “Sorta creepy doesn’t begin to describe it.”

“Did we tell you about when Harry tried to eat a bit of bread?” Liam offers, and Harry furrows his brows merely at the thought. “He took a slice from the loaf downstairs, right, and—”

“—He brought it up to the attic and pinched off the tiniest little bit of the crust and put it in his mouth,” Louis interrupts, nudges his shoulder against Harry’s, “and—tell him what happened, Haz.”

“‘s not that funny,” Harry grumbles. Liam doesn’t bother with chiding Louis for interrupting.

“It fell straight through his jaw!” Louis says, with the kind of delight he reserves for particularly funny punchlines.

Niall blinks, but isn’t sure what else he would’ve expected. Louis and Liam are staring at him expectantly, though, and the longer he imagines Harry’s face... he cackles, delightedly, claps a hand over his mouth.

Eventually Harry loosens up about it, smiles when Louis swings an arm over his shoulders and wipes imaginary tears on his sleeve. Even Zayn smiles about it, a small tug at the corner of his lips.

Niall doesn’t notice Liam has left the room until he comes back and says, quietly, “The housekeeper’s coming.”

It’s clearly not the first time this has happened to them. Zayn disappears in the blink of an eye, gone without a sound or flourish, while Harry grabs Louis’ forearm and swims through the air and up through the ceiling, to the following floor, presumably, and Liam dives for the bed itself, falling onto his back and right through the sheets.

“The _tray_ , Niall,” his mattress hisses, and Niall shoves it under the sheets as Reilly knocks at the cracked door.

“Hey,” Niall says, and he feels like a kid, trying to play off a really bad poker face to his mother. Reilly’s head sticks around the doorframe and there’s a moment when he looks confused, but then his eyebrows even out and he just says, “Just lettin’ ya know, I’m out to the shops but there’s toast in the kitchen.”

Niall nods desperately, stiff and all too aware of the awkward shape the tray makes across his knees, under the sheets.

Reilly nods at him and glances around the room. “You’re alright for the day, then?”

“Fine,” Niall chokes, “Fine, yeah.”

“Right,” Reilly says, and closes the door behind him. Niall can hear his boots going down the stairs in the silence of his own baited breath.

“Whew!” Louis says, just beside Niall’s ear. “That was close.”

Niall shoves at him out of habit, and Louis just dodges it, airily, winds his way around Niall’s shoulders to his other side to make an odd noise in his ear. Harry’s settling in at the foot of the bed again, lean and curled up, cat-like, and Liam is slowly pulling himself out of the mattress.

Niall glances between them and then checks the ceiling. “Where’s Zayn?”

“Oh,” Louis says, almost belated, and then too fast, “he’s probably checking that your housekeeper is really leaving or something.”

It should be insulting that Louis thinks he can lie to Niall now just because he’s a ghost, just because Niall hasn’t had to put up with his darting eyes and quick tight-lipped tones for too long now.

Niall’s still too glad that he’s _here_ , that he’s _able_ to lie to him, to be mad.

He lets it go.

;

It should be harder to accept, maybe. Niall should care that it doesn’t make sense, that he’s never really believed in things bigger than this immediate life, that he’s _lost his mind_. Or that, and he’s not sure if it’s better or worse, he _hasn’t_ , and his bandmates are very much actual ghosts in his house: that in cutting himself away from the world he had with them, they’re the only ones who could reach him.

Niall’s relieved every time he wakes up and they’re still there, swears to himself that he’ll never let himself get used to it, hallucinations or spirits or a bit of both, if that’s what it takes to keep them. He’s spent months trying to learn to live on his own, and it hasn’t taken, and Niall watches them stack like matryoshka dolls, giggling and sharing space; their edges slipping sometimes, as he drinks in their sharp, sweet, silly faces. There’s no time for questions, at least not the kind that bring with them a fear of the lads faltering, of their already-precarious solidity wavering as part of a big, elaborate cosmic joke.

He watches them, instead, and the longer he looks, the more he sees. Lack of work to do or a schedule to follow makes them even more unpredictable, with no particular driving force to sway them to or away from pranks and stupid jokes. Sometimes they simply laze about. 

One of those afternoons they’re in the drawing room, Harry and Zayn flipping through the records, Louis slipping in and out of the piano and making weird sounds with it, Liam sat on the bench giggling delightedly at him. 

Niall notices it entirely by accident. He’s gotten used to letting his eyes drift across the room, not letting any of the lads out of his sight for longer than it takes to look at the others, but he lingers on Liam, this time: his hair’s still buzzed short, doesn’t look like it’ll change anytime soon if it hasn’t at this point... and there on the side of his head, just above his ear and edging his temple, there’s a dark bruise, deep purple and blue, with a wound the length and width of Niall’s index finger in the middle of it. It’s not bleeding, but it’s not healed over, either; the edges are raw and the centre of it is deep red and black.

It’s strange, because if Niall isn’t looking at it, looking _for_ it, he can’t see it, but once that switch is flipped in his head he notices them on the other boys, too. Clear across Harry’s face, if the light hits him just so, there’s a gash that runs diagonally from cheekbone to chin, catching the corner of his mouth; on Louis’ arm, there’s an uneven half-scrape, half-friction burn that covers the side of his forearm, elbow to wrist.

Niall stares from one to the other with increasing dread. Each time he looks, for the first second he thinks _maybe not_ , and then he blinks or looks harder and there it is. The boys themselves don’t seem to notice: Louis raises from the piano to empty a pamphlet of loose sheet music over Harry’s head, and Harry looks up, face splitting with a smile (and, Niall’s mind adds morosely, his scar). Liam laughs and grabs at Louis’ wrist, tumbling the both of them over in air somersaults until they fall through the piano with a long, discordant arpeggio. If it’s a revelation to Niall, it must not be to them. 

His reaction to it, though, doesn't go unnoticed. “Hey,” Zayn says, softly, and the other boys all turn to look. He’s curled along the arm of Niall’s armchair, now, had been reading over his shoulder in the Sports section of the news. Now he’s sitting up straight and watching Niall carefully. Niall doesn’t want to look at him. 

“You alright, Nialler?” Zayn asks.

“Look like you’ve seen a ghost!” Louis says, cheerfully letting Liam out of his headlock and flitting closer to light on the floor at Niall’s feet. The burn on his arm looks darker up close. Niall thinks he might be sick.

“Have you... Christ, have you had those all along?” He asks, dropping the paper into his lap and fiddling with the black and blue friendship bracelet around his wrist, the one he found tucked away in a box and hasn’t taken off since.

Liam cocks his head and looks confused. “Had what?”

“The—fuck,” Niall sighs, and he’s so torn between looking up and around at them and just keeping his eyes on his hands. It probably makes him look crazy, eyes restless.

“It’s the death marks, innit?” Zayn says, small from beside him. Harry’s hand comes up to his cheek, unconsciously, fingertips over his cut that seems to fade or deepen depending on how he holds his head. 

Liam moves closer to Niall, doesn’t quite touch him and, Niall notes, turns his head just so, his head wound out of sight. “I wish you didn’t have to see them,” he offers, gentle. “We don’t really know how to get rid of ‘em.”

“I think they give us a bit of character,” Louis offers, twists his arm around to look at his, or at least the most prominent of them, anyway; the more Niall looks, the more of them he notices, a few nicks and scrapes that almost twinkle on their skin. “Harry looks like a supervillain.”

“They’re a bit worse some days than others,” Harry adds. “More noticeable. Most times we just sort of forget about them, to be honest, and we didn’t want to mention them if you hadn’t noticed. They can be rather shocking.”

Louis scoffs. “They’re _hardcore_ , Harold. Anyway.” He smiles charmingly at Niall. “They’re not _too_ gruesome, are they? Shall you keep us in spite of them?”

“Don’t go,” Niall blurts, eyes wide. “Hadn’t seen ‘em is all,” he adds, weakly, self-deprecatingly. They’re not _bad_ , just. An unpleasant reminder.

Zayn makes a soft sound. “We’re not going anywhere,” he says, and Niall looks—not up, but sort of over, to Zayn’s skinny legs perched on the arm of his chair. It’s the only reason he can tell when Zayn reaches for his arm. His fingers stretch out from the worn-looking cuffs of the sweatshirt he’s been wearing for the past week, wrists as delicate as Niall remembers, and his hand goes around Niall’s arm as if he’s giving him a comforting squeeze. Niall feels a slight chill, around and through his arm, and then nothing.

Zayn’s legs and hand disappear from beside him. 

“Aw, fuck,” Louis says. 

Niall looks around at them, the other three still a little too pale, grisly in a way that’s newly jarring. They look back, hesitantly. 

“S’just Zayn,” Liam offers. 

Louis seems to shake himself, and grins. It doesn’t reach his eyes. Again, Niall gets a creeping feeling he’s being condescended to. “Just being moody old Zayn,” Louis says.

“Yeah,” says Niall. “Sure.” He doesn’t know why they’re covering for Zayn. It shouldn’t matter, he tells himself, it _doesn’t_ matter, because they’re all here and nothing, not the marks or the occasional weirdness, is going to make him think too hard about it. Niall knows what happens in the movies when people start questioning things. They disappear.

;

By the end of the first month, Niall isn’t easily startled. The boys come and go and most of that coming and going consists of appearing or disappearing out of or into nothing. For Niall, it becomes progressively more normal when Liam makes his glass float while he’s having breakfast before fading into focus with a proud little smile, or when Louis sprouts up from an ancient rug and makes a silly face at him. Still, when Harry pops through the keyhole of the loo door just as Niall’s shaking his willy, he jumps a little. 

Harry waves his hands urgently. “Shhh! I’m not supposed to be here, ever since Louis made the rule about special loo time. Although I think that’s more about how he’s jealous of your wang.” 

Niall sighs, and looks expectantly at him, fingers pinching the zipper tab at his fly. 

“I need a favor,” Harry concludes, smiling hopefully.

“What can I do that you can’t?” Niall half-laughs, zipping up and stepping towards the sink to wash his hands. It doesn’t carry as much weight as it would’ve at the beginning, now that they’ve settled that there _are_ quite a few activities ghosts can’t really partake in.

Harry looks down at his feet. “So um, you know like, my cars? The ones you have?” He wrings his fingers nervously, then asks in a small voice, “Could you take me down to see them? Like, ‘cause I don’t really know if I can go out there alone, being like, not a solid person and stuff. But it’s okay if you don’t want to.”

“I thought you were gonna ask for like, I dunno,” Niall grins, drying his hands off. “Something like, tough.”

“Is that a yes?” Harry’s smile is beatific, punctuated with translucent little dimples.

“Yeah,”  Niall shrugs. “Of course.”

;

Citing a terrible ghostly pain in his back, and his need for Liam to fix it _and_ Zayn to be there to hold his hand through the horrors of a back massage, Louis counts himself and the other two out, leaving Harry and Niall to go on their adventure alone. After a moment’s deliberation of the best way to hold Harry down in case a strong wind blows (Louis suggests tying a string to Harry’s ankle for Niall to hold, like an overgrown puppy-balloon hybrid), Niall slips his hand into Harry’s; not literally, to his relief, but with just enough solidity that he can almost ignore the unpleasant tingly static from the contact.

“Oh,” Harry says. “That’s nice.” 

“Your _face_ is nice,” Niall retorts, making a mental note to maybe ask the others about it later. The touching, that is; not Harry’s nice face. He’d quite like to touch Zayn and Liam and Louis, but touching Harry is a good start.

They make their way down to the garage slowly, Niall walking carefully in the light dusting of snow with his slight limp and Harry hovering along, looking around at the muted browns and greys surrounding them like he used to when he surveyed foreign cities and massive venues for his next post on Instagram. 

“This the first time you’ve been outside?” Niall wonders aloud, adjusting his grip on Harry’s wispy hand. 

“Since you had your tattoos done, yeah,” Harry says, and then blinks, slowing his drift to match Niall’s faltering step. 

“Since I what?” Niall asks. He can just hear the buzzing of the gun, smell the slight dampness of the basement parlor and the malt of his drink. They’ve healed already, with no scabbing and minimal peeling.

Harry’s fingers clutch at his hand as if he’s afraid Niall will let go. “Don’t be cross, we weren’t sure if we ought to tell you or not, Nialler.”

“You were there? Were you _all_ there?” Niall asks, can’t keep himself from wondering how long they’ve been here, how much they’ve seen. It’s a horrible feeling. He doesn’t know how he never thought of it before.

“We—I mean, we weren’t...” Harry licks his lips, frustrated. “Back then we weren’t very good at like... being? I don’t really know how to explain it, like, we couldn’t _hold_ very well. I mean, Zayn still has a bit of trouble with it sometimes, but. We kept trying to get your attention but we couldn’t touch things and you couldn’t see us and we had to practice for a while before we could manage it.” 

Niall doesn’t quite _understand_ , but if he thinks about his four best mates being ghosts for too long, his head just hurts. “I think I felt it,” he offers, digs the garage keys out of his pocket as they get to the side door. “Back then I thought I was just imagining it or summat, but that... makes sense, I s’pose.”

Harry flits through the door as Niall pushes it open and hovers just at his eye level, looking serious. “We tried so hard to show you,” he says. “It just took us a while to figure out how.”

“I’m glad you did,” Niall says, earnest, flicking the lights on. The cars have been covered since his last visit, all fitted perfectly in neat rows of slate grey and off white. He’ll have to remember to thank Reilly for his foresight.  

Harry tumbles between and across the row of cars until he slides down the cover of a small one next to the two Range Rovers. “This one, please,” he says, beckoning Niall over. “I can’t lift the cover by myself, I don’t think. Liam might, but I’m not so good at big things.” 

It’s so gently self-deprecating that Niall can’t help a smile. “‘Course.” It’s easy enough for him to pull the soft-lined vinyl off, leaving it in a pile on the floor like a shed skin. 

Harry exhales in quiet pleasure, running his pale fingertips up the cherry red hood of his Jaguar. The cars remain untouched; cleaned and polished on the outside as requested by Niall, but the interiors left intact. “Hullo, darling.”

“Need a minute?” Niall offers jokingly, unwinding the scarf from around his neck and unbuttoning his coat, dropping both on top of the car cover.

“Nah,” Harry grins, doing a wonky somersault over the windshield, through the twill top and into the driver’s seat. “C’mere.”

Niall obligingly gets in on the passenger side, leaning back against the leather seat and watching as Harry rubs his palms around the driver’s wheel. “You haven’t taken her out,” Harry says after a minute, brow wrinkling as he turns to look at Niall. It’s mildly accusing, in the way only Harry can be.

Niall can’t quite meet his eyes. “Not great weather for such a doll out on the country roads of County Donegal, is it?” 

Harry leans back in his own seat, his head tipped onto the top of the bench seat, cheek pale but not slipping through the leather. “Maybe in the spring, then,” he says. “You’d love her, Ni. The way she handles, s’like a dream. A little bit wild, but give’r a gentle hand and she’ll be just fine. Perfect for cruising, the wind in your hair...” he smiles, eyes closing. It’s too obvious he’s remembering it all. 

Niall wants to kiss him, suddenly and viciously, and he’s leaning across the empty space of the bench seat to do it before he can think. He’s struck by a sense of sadness when Harry’s surprised at the gesture: although the sensation is odd, the same numb tingling he’s felt whenever they’ve touched before, it’s still just a kiss like hundreds of others they’ve shared before, like hundreds more they’ve had with the other boys. Harry must’ve forgotten what that feels like, which only makes Niall want to kiss him even _more_ , so he does, presses in until he’s scared he’ll just push his lips right through Harry’s, and then pulls away. 

“Wait,” Harry protests, brows furrowed, a hand absently coming up to press his fingers to his lips. “Just—here,” he mumbles, leans in so Niall will meet him halfway, brows still knitted together. The second kiss is different: Niall feels a change right away, subtle, and it’s like Harry grows steadier, slowly but surely, like his lips somehow become more solid the longer he focuses. Instead of just tingling, there’s a hint of pressure from Harry, and. 

And when Niall parts his lips and fits them around Harry’s bottom lip, it’s not really like kissing a person, but it’s a kiss all the same, holds the same familiar intimacy. It’s reminiscent of the first time Harry came home to Ireland with Niall, when they were just kids, and ate too many bags of crisps to count, and played Xbox until their eyes hurt, and kicked a ball around outside although Harry was absolute shit at it, and tentatively fitted their mouths together late at night, their legs tangled together under the covers in Niall’s twin-sized bed.

When they draw apart, only Niall is breathing heavily. Looking up at Harry, though, he finds Harry’s eyes dark, pupils wide. His fingers curl into Niall’s sleeve, and for a split second, they feel warm through the fabric. 

“Wow,” Niall breathes.

“Yeah,” Harry grins. “Lou’s gonna be pissed he missed this.”

;

_Let’s be like, really slick about telling them,_ Harry had said, but Niall can’t really see how blurting out, “We may or may not have snogged in the Jag, lads,” when they’re gathered in the drawing room after supper counts as anything remotely slick.

“‘s that how you do it with all the birds, Haz?” Liam laughs, floats over to the armchair Niall’s huddled in, feet on the cushions. Louis, as predicted, isn’t nearly as amused, his face a priceless mix of bewilderment and pride and, somehow at the same time, jealousy.

“Only the fit blondes,” Harry shrugs, waggling his brows. It’s more of a full-bodied waggle, really, floating a couple of feet above the spot where the red sofa once sat, legs folded neatly. Niall sneaks a glance at Zayn, perched on top of the baby grand.

For once he’s completely unmoving, eyes fixed on Harry as he makes his way to Louis, sprawling across his boy’s lap. Niall isn’t sure what that means. 

Louis feigns disgust at Harry, slipping a hand into his hair all the same. “Slag. How?” he demands. 

“Well,” Harry drawls, and grins at Niall. “Niall attacked my face, to start.”

Liam frowns. “Wait, but wouldn’t he just like... go through you?”

“See, Liam, I thought so, too,” Harry almost purrs, eyelids sliding closed as Louis scratches at his scalp. “But then like. You know when you wanna like, grab something? And you’ve got to think about your hand closing around it, and stuff? It was sort of like that. I reckon you should be quite good at it.”

Liam sucks on his lower lip, and swivels to face Niall. “What’d it feel like for you, Nialler?” 

“Boy needs a chapstick,” Niall jokes, laughs when Harry squints to look at him. “Dunno, it’s like a kiss. Except a bit less like a kiss, but it was good.”

“Very eloquent, Niall; give him a hand, lads,” Louis nods. Both Liam and Harry clap, but Louis doesn’t bother to pull his hands out of Harry’s hair.

“Did it hurt?” Zayn asks so, so quietly, fingertips tapping soundlessly at the polished surface of the piano, dipping into the wood.

Niall isn’t looking at him, so what he sees first is Louis’ reaction; the sharp movement of his jaw as it clenches, the way his fingers go so tight in Harry’s curls that Harry winces out of habit. 

“No,” Niall says, automatic even though it’s obviously not his question to answer.

“No,” Harry murmurs, sitting up in Louis’ lap. “No, it was… so nice. The longer we did it the more… real it felt, I guess.”

“It does seem a bit scary,” Liam concedes, walking his fingers over Niall’s shoulder, muttering an apology when one of his fingertips dips into him, like stepping in a puddle. “But you’re both okay, yeah?”

“I’m alright,” Niall nods, as Harry nuzzles Louis’ neck and says, “‘m okay.”

“We’re gonna have to have tests,” Louis says, after a minute. “Like, proper scientific, to see how it works.”

Harry giggles, and Niall catches himself licking his lips as if he could taste him still. He can’t, of course. 

Zayn is curled in on himself near the ceiling, looking pale, even for a ghost.

;

The next logical step the day after Harry and Niall’s breakthrough, according to Louis who has somehow become an expert on ghostly kiss science and hand-waved physics, is to conduct experiments. While these apparently don't require a controlled atmosphere, Louis is adamant about proper technique. According to him, that means with optimal tongue.

Which is how Niall finds himself under considerable pressure as three pairs of eyes watch him brush his lips against Liam's. 

"More tongue!" Louis hisses. 

Harry makes a noise which could be assent or remembrance of a particularly enjoyable banana.

"I've just started," Niall complains, backing away and wiping his mouth self consciously, although it's anything but wet. Mostly numb, to be honest.

“Do you mean his tongue or mine?” Liam asks with a tentatively raised hand. At this point Niall’s gotten used to imagining the pink that used to color Liam’s cheeks whenever Louis came up with schemes like this.

Louis grimaces. "Both! Either! Honestly, lads, it's not like you've never put on a show for us before."

Niall ducks his head and looks up through his lashes at Liam. Ever the helpful one, Harry whispers, “Remember to like, focus on solidity, Liam.” Niall can see Louis nodding in agreement out the corner of his eye. Zayn is quiet, somewhere beyond Louis, and Niall forces himself to concentrate.

Liam leans in first, this time, brows in a determined furrow. Niall closes his eyes, half-squeezed and expecting the static and numbness he’s learnt to associate with touching the boys... but instead he gets firm pressure, steadier than Harry had been and what feels truly _warm_ in places.

"Liam looks like he's taking a shit!" Louis crows, altogether too gleeful.

"I'm concentrating!" Liam says, affronted, but only just pulled back, his eyes fixed on Niall's mouth. 

"Ignore him," Niall says, breathlessly, "c'mon, that was—"

"Good?" Liam asks, licking his lips instinctively. 

"Yeah," Harry says. He sounds a bit dazed. "I'll probably be proper jealous in a bit that you're better than I am, but just carry on."

"Or, hullo," Louis interjects, "you know who hasn't had a turn with dear Nialler? Zayn, mate, why don't you give it a go?"

Niall looks over at Zayn, who's glaring at Louis. He can’t even question Louis’ blatant objectification, not when Zayn looks caught between fear and anger.

"It's not that bad, is it, kissing me?" Niall tries to joke. The words feel heavy in his mouth, reminiscent of the way he's been feeling too often, compared to the boys’ lightness. 

It's strange, to be looking straight at someone as they disappear. One second Zayn's there, edges too sharp, quivering, and then he's gone, the air bending around his form to take up the new space. Niall shivers, and it has nothing to do with the slight after-chill of Liam's mouth.

;

Niall holds out as long as he can before climbing the stairs to his bedroom that night. He’d barely eaten at dinner, even with Harry giving him mournful looks, and Liam juggling spoons to try to cheer everyone up. Zayn is still absent, and Niall can’t ignore it. It’s surprising when he realizes the difference isn’t a lack of noise—when Louis is in another room even for a second the house seems deathly still—but even when Zayn’s around he’s quiet. What’s missing is Zayn’s very presence, his small grins over the heads of the other lads, his eyes on Niall every time Niall looks up.

He changes into his pyjamas and brushes his teeth in the bedroom, stepping in and out of the loo as needed, just so he can keep an eye on the boys. Louis goes through his closet, translucent fingertips running over the hangers, while Harry and Liam hover just above the carpet facing each other, legs crossed, Harry humming something under his (lack of a) breath. Niall isn’t sure if they’re meditating or trying to see who can make the other one laugh first, but he suspects it might be a bit of both. It distracts him, anyway, and he appreciates it, but by the time he climbs in bed and nestles under the covers, he still hasn’t managed to shake his worry over Zayn.

The lads, sprawled at the foot of the bed, pretend to be sleeping—even though they’ve explained to Niall that ghosts _can’t_ rest, as it’s sort of the whole point of being a ghost —when Zayn slips in from the ceiling, expression inscrutable but calm. Niall can’t anticipate his next move; he half expects him to just float right off again, or perhaps go to the corner and literally blend into the shadows, somehow, away from the pale moonlight coming in from between the curtains, but instead, Zayn sinks onto the bed at Niall’s side. He cocks an eyebrow as if to ask if it’s alright, but before Niall even understands the question, Zayn is already sinking again, through the downy comforter until his head touches the pillow beside Niall’s. The bed doesn’t dip, and his presence doesn’t make the sheets any warmer, but he’s back.

Niall suddenly wants to cry. It’s such a horrible contrast to the way they’ve shared beds a hundred times before, but his relief at Zayn’s return is overpowering any sorrow. He wants to reach out, fists his hands in the sheets so he _won’t_. 

Zayn’s face is silvery in the dim light, in stark contrast to the deep black of his hair, tousled as if it’s actually touching Niall’s pillow. All deep black but for the stripe of blonde, as pale as his face, hidden underneath. Niall could stare at him forever, he thinks, so glad he’s here, but for the wave of dread at the remembrance of earlier that day.

Niall doesn’t know if Zayn’s going to say anything, or if _he_ should say anything, or if anyone should ever say anything again. He’s got a million questions he could ask Zayn: why he disappeared earlier, why he won’t even try to kiss Niall now, and why he seems put off by the others kissing in a way he never was before Paris, when kisses (and sometimes more) were something they all shared indiscriminately. 

He rolls over onto his side, facing Zayn before he can talk himself out of it, and Zayn watches him from under his fringe. His lips twitch, and then he’s tipping his head forward, as if he were going to press their foreheads together, and Niall almost hopes he will. 

Instead, though, suddenly but as naturally as if Zayn had said it out loud, Niall just... _knows_ they’re okay. His breath catches in his throat in surprise: it’s like magic, like something out of _Inception_ but simpler and much more natural. It’s not so much about words, an apology or reassurance, as it is calm washing through him, trickling down from his head to the tips of his toes.

Niall’s breath is still shallow when Zayn smiles tentatively. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Niall says, and it sounds too loud. He glances at the others, but none of them have roused; Louis is curled at the foot of the bed like a comma, with Harry tucked against his chest, fit tightly together, ankles and fingers locked as if they’re otters, afraid of floating away from each other in the night. Liam is swaying lightly between the two spires of the bed-end, as if in an invisible hammock. A ghost hammock, Niall thinks, momentarily amused, and Zayn grins back like he knows. 

Zayn tugs at the duvet, pulling it a little higher, and Niall pretends like he doesn’t see the way his fingers slip through the fabric like air.

;

Niall doesn’t expect it to happen again. Zayn can barely stay still for a second during the days, when they’re around the other lads; always drifting or fidgeting to stay in one place, his edges slightly hazy. But the next night and every night since, Zayn has slipped through the duvet like a chilled breeze, lingering until Niall closes his eyes for good. 

Most nights they just lie there, two small bodies in Niall’s big bed, with the other lads close but graciously pretending to sleep. It’s comforting and bittersweet, but as with all the rest, the easy banter and jokes and familiarity, Niall finds himself all too willing to take what he’s given. 

Some nights they talk, hushed like before, like nights spent tucked into Niall’s bunk on the bus, whispering when the others had gone on to sleep or were just down the hall, playing on the Xbox in the lounge. Back then they’d talk about all sorts of things, from silly arguments over the best kind of bread for sandwiches or unanimously agreeing that they’d give up being pop stars to be X-Men to reminiscing about being on The X Factor, or the first time they went to Italy and had so much gelato Niall almost hurled in an elevator, or when they were kids, so far removed from being internationally famous pop stars.

It’s harder to speak casually, now. During the day, when it’s the five of them, it’s easy enough; Louis and Liam are full of cheerful conversation, and Niall is easily distracted by it. But during these nights when the world has narrowed to Niall and Zayn sharing a pillow, it’s more difficult. When Niall brings up that one time in Miami or that other time in Barcelona, it’s with a sense of... not fear, really, but wariness, like if he says the wrong thing Zayn might disappear again, and he’s not ready for that. He hasn’t really recovered from losing the lads once, can’t imagine losing them again. Can’t admit that they’re technically still lost. (If they are, he thinks, angrily, then he’s lost with them.)

It’s another night with careful, whispered conversation, drifting into silence, that has Niall wishing he could find the right words. He’s gotten better at keeping track of time, now that he’s got a reason to: it’s been a month and a half since he walked into the attic, and two weeks since Zayn got into his bed, and neither of them have talked about what Niall can’t stop thinking of. 

So he asks, with a surge of courage during a lull in conversation. “You remember that night in Oakland? I said… you asked if I really…” Niall closes his eyes, and digs his fingernails into his palms. It’s like his dream again, the blurred shadows and warm tones playing like a film behind his eyelids. 

“Yeah, I remember,” Zayn says quietly, and Niall’s learned to not take his dryness to heart, not when certain things are brought up. He doesn’t know _why_ , but Zayn won’t let anything show that he doesn’t want, these days.

Niall’s eyes stay closed. “I don’t remember what I said, but I hope I said yes.”

Without seeing or hearing Zayn move just a little closer, Niall’s caught off guard when tingly warmth washes over him, starting deep in his chest and spreading infectiously. By the time it reaches his belly it’s a fluttering sensation, a stir reminiscent of his body’s reaction to intimacy. Before he can hold onto it, though, settle into the feeling, Zayn’s pulling it back into himself. Niall opens his eyes.

“Shit,” he breathes, smiles helplessly, and Zayn looks taken aback, like he expected anything but Niall’s happiness and incredulity. It’s just... it feels like a projection of the way Niall would react if Zayn were a solid, warm body. Instead it’s like an echo: Zayn can _give him feelings_ ; it’s not like he couldn’t, before, but they’re not coming from Niall, just transmitted from Zayn. Niall thinks it’s just as sweet, more than enough of a _yes_. He lets out a shuddering breath, and licks his lips. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Zayn mutters, his smile crooked, but a smile nonetheless.

;

Reilly isn’t spending as much time in the house. Niall would probably have noticed it sooner if he hadn’t been so absorbed in refereeing ghost hide and seek and learning to cook to keep Harry off his back. The grocery list is still stuck to the fridge, the kitchen restocked each weekend, and Niall often observes him working out in the gardens despite the chilly late winter weather, the ground barely thawed to give way to spring. 

“Haven’t seen you much,” he points out, when they’re sharing a rare dinner at the kitchen table. Reilly’s looking over the sports column as Niall stares fruitlessly at the crossword. He’ll take it upstairs for Harry and Zayn later. 

Reilly raises an eyebrow at him as he unfolds the paper. “Been off seeing me lady in town,” he says.

“Oh,” Niall says. He hadn’t really considered the fact his housekeeper might have a life outside the castle. It seems stupidly naïve, now. “That’s grand.”

“Ah chin up,” Reilly grins, reaching over to shove Niall’s shoulder. “You’re doin’ just fine, you are. Don’t need me to babysit ye.” He sounds nearly too wise for a moment. “‘Sides, you keep yerself busy, don’t you.”

Niall looks at him, hoping he doesn’t look as guilty as he feels. There’s a sudden chill in the kitchen, wrapping around his ankles where they’re bare in his old-man slippers. He knows it’s Louis. He isn’t sure how, but lately he can tell. Besides, it would only make sense; Louis’ always been the one a little too protective. 

The light over the sink flickers so minutely that Niall barely notices out of his peripheral vision. 

“Busy enough,” Niall concedes with a slightly stiff shrug.

“Good to hear,” Reilly says, taking a sip of his tea. “Good to hear.”

;

Niall leaves the crossword with Zayn and Harry, curled up on his bed, and heads down the hall to where they’d said Liam and Louis were sorting shoes in Liam’s room, to give them the comics section Louis’d requested. He’s about to laugh at the proper _mess_ they’ve made of the room, mismatched shoes everywhere, boxes and tissue paper strewn across the bed and floor, when the sound sticks in his throat. 

Thing is, seeing Liam and Louis kiss isn’t an _unfamiliar_ sight, per sé, wasn’t even unexpected before the accident, but... now they’re ghosts, tucked up into the corner between the nightstand and the bed, hidden in plain sight, as it were. Back when they both had a pulse, it’d usually be racing when they kissed, fresh off the stage or off a chase down a hotel hallway, panting from a wrestling match turned tickle fight turned biting, laughing kisses that made the others smile. They’re _careful_ , now, touching so, so gently, heads tilted at perfect angles and lips moving slowly, like anything sudden might ruin the moment.

Niall stands absolutely still, watching them. They should know he’s here: the boys have told him repeatedly how superior their senses are, now, but if they do they’re pretending not, and Niall can’t tell the difference. He wonders if this is anything like what it looked like when he kissed Harry. 

He isn’t sure what gives him away, but when they break apart, laughing silently, hands gripping each other tight as they sway off-balance, Louis grins over at him. “Were you going to say something, mate, or just keep watching?”

Niall frowns instinctively and crosses his arms. “I would’ve said something,” he begins. “It just... surprised me, s’all.” 

Liam looks vaguely worried. “Don’t tell, yeah?” he says, “Not—Harry knows, it’s not like that, but… we’re just trying it out, for now.”

Niall glances between them. “I don’t understand,” he says, slowly. “If Harry knows, why are you…” 

Louis and Liam glance at each other, and peel apart, sliding over to him. 

“Just, we don’t want to upset Zayn, right?” Liam looks distinctly uncomfortable.

“He’s got it a bit harder than the rest of us,” Louis says, and he looks stern for a moment before pulling Niall into his cool, static-y shoulder and ruffling his hair. “Nothing to worry your pretty little head about, though, we’ll get it cleared up!”

Liam nods, and then, apparently just spotting the paper tucked under Niall’s arm, brightens considerably. “Is that the funnies?”

“Yeah,” Niall nods, handing them over. 

“Brilliant!” Louis crows, and they chatter over Dennis the Menace as if it were normal to swear Niall to secrecy over a simple kiss.

;

“So,” Niall says. He, Harry, and Louis are the only ones in the kitchen, having just watched Reilly drive out the gate, waiting for toast to finish before they take breakfast back upstairs. Niall didn’t realize he'd been waiting on such an opportunity until it came. Now he has to know.

“Spit it out, Nialler,” Louis smirks. He’s been writing out a neat column of truly unnecessary and excessive requests on the grocery list, Harry giggling as he watches over his shoulder. Niall has spotted “goose neck purée” and three types of champagne and monkey brains. If it were closer to Halloween rather than Easter, Niall might think Louis was gathering supplies for some black magic ritual. As it is he’s probably just trying to make Niall look like an arse. 

“It’s Zayn,” Niall says, a little distracted. “Does he… do the feelings thing with you lot?”

“Feelings thing?” For a second it seems Louis is about to play innocent, and then he shrugs. “A bit? I think it’s probably different with us, but I know what you mean. A bit miffed none of the rest of us got cool ghostly powers, to be honest.”

“That’s Zayn though, innit,” Harry says, hovering with his legs folded up beneath him. “Always has to be the most mysterious.” He wiggles his fingers. Louis rolls his eyes, and it’s so fond Niall’s surprised they don’t fall out of his head.

“Oi, have you tried like, taking your eyes out?” Niall asks, directed at both. 

Louis, of course, perks up at the suggestion of anything remotely gruesome before Harry can even speak. “I have not,” he hums, crosses his eyes for good measure. “Do you reckon I could?” Much to Harry’s horror and to Niall’s mixture of disgust and fascination, Louis opens his eyes as wide as they’ll go and proceeds to poke at their edges, like he’s trying to wedge his fingertips in between his eyeballs and their sockets. Small and dainty as his fingers might be, it doesn’t really work.

“Well, this is stupid,” he says, dropping his hands away from his face and blinking slowly. His eyes don’t seem irritated or bothered much, really; they just sort of... stay. “Maybe I can get Liam to do it.”

“Oh, bummer,” Harry says, obviously relieved.

“Anyhow,” Louis says, and for a moment Niall is afraid he’ll attempt to ignore their earlier discussion. "Why'd you ask?"

Niall shrugs, suddenly wondering if he should've brought it up at all. "Just... He’s done it with me a couple of times? And I wasn't sure—"

"If you were special or if he treats all the boys like that," Louis finishes, smiling slightly. 

"It's been Zayn's thing," Harry adds. "Since we got here, he's been able to, like, share emotions when he touches you sometimes? We're not exactly sure how it works."

"Sometimes it _doesn't_ ," Louis says, flatly.

"Is that, like. Why he..." Niall doesn't want to say _poofs_.

Louis does it for him, anyway. “Why sometimes he can’t get it up, metaphorically speaking,” he nods, satisfied at his own joke.

Harry looks like he might giggle, but then seems to remember the seriousness of the conversation. "We don't really know, but it makes sense, doesn't it? Like, his power or energy levels or whatever must fluctuate a lot."

“Don’t be mean, Harold,” Louis says, gently enough, but with a frown. “It’s not his fault, I mean, the man’s _dead_.” 

Harry winces, and glances at Niall apologetically. "I'm gonna go." He gives Louis one last meaningful look, one of those conversations the two of them have always been able to contain into a well-placed glance or two, and disappears.

Niall stares at the place where he was a long moment, still not quite used to seeing the innate grace of disappearing into thin air in someone as clumsy as Harry, and then looks at Louis. “I didn’t wanna say anything,” he says, apologetically. He still doesn’t, really, is still scared of the consequences of bringing it up. 

“I mean, you could only let it slide for so long,” Louis hums, tapping the pen he’d been using on the countertop. “Mate, I know we’re ghosts, but you don’t have to be _scared_ of us.”

Plucking the toast out of the toaster, Niall shakes his head, scrunches his nose. Maybe if he downplays it, Louis won’t think it’s much of a big deal, either. “Not so much scared of you as I am of you disappearing on me, I think.” He exhales, turns away to pick up the knife from the butter dish.

Louis is silent for a minute, and then Niall feels him, his little hand tingly on Niall’s hip, his chin icy over Niall’s shoulder. “We’re not going anywhere, Nialler,” he whispers. His voice is something fierce. “Zayn’s just scared, yeah? We all were at first, but he’s had a hard time believing it, you know? That this is real, that we get t’keep it.”

Niall hums his agreement, tips his head against Louis’, even though it feels a bit like brain freeze from eating too much ice cream too fast. It makes sense. That’s always been the difference between him and Zayn: while Niall would rather make the most of their situation, take advantage of it while he can, Zayn would rather not get hurt in the first place.

Louis pinches the bare skin of his side, just above his sweats. “You should talk to him,” he says. “Get your act together, Horan.” They both know what he isn’t saying, that Zayn won’t be the one to bring it up.

“I’ll work on it,” Niall nods, resolute. “Talk to Zayn. Right.”

“At ease, soldier,” Louis smirks, snatching a piece of toast out of Niall’s plate with one hand (what for, Niall hasn’t got a clue) and giving him a friendly, cold grope with the other. Niall’s laughter has the other boys literally coming out of the woodwork to join in the chase after Louis and the stolen toast.

;

It hadn’t taken the boys long to figure out that there was an order to the way Niall scattered their belongings throughout the guest rooms. When he’d first moved in it only seemed logical to Niall, really, that each of the boys should have their own space, even if they weren’t really there. Now that they _are_ , the arrangement makes Liam thank him for keeping his shoes with a chilly headbutt, makes Harry beam when he finds the postcards in his and Louis’ room.

The boys are wandering around, one afternoon, crossing walls and bringing things back to Niall’s bedroom, going through their makeshift shrines for a lack of something better to do, when Liam fetches the drawing Ant sent at Christmas and hands it to Zayn.

“This looks cool, did you do it?” Liam asks, voice quiet in that way it always is with Zayn, bumping their shoulders where they’re settled on the duvet. Harry looks over their shoulders, floating around one of the bedposts.

Zayn takes the paper. Niall nearly applauds but fists his hands instead, bites back his smile at the way Zayn’s fingers tremble but don’t go through the notebook paper. “Yeah,” Zayn says, “um, I don’t remember… when, really, but yeah, s’mine.”

Niall can’t keep quiet, this time, bursting with the desire to keep Zayn talking. “Ant sent it round at Christmas, there was a note somewhere, I think?” It’s crazy; stupid, even, but Niall’s never been too cautious when it comes to the boys, and Zayn in particular. He’d do anything to keep that tiny smile on Zayn’s face. Which is why he says—“I could call him, if you like. Or, or, your mum, or Perrie.”

Louis is just coming back from one of the rooms, but he catches enough of what Niall’s said—infers the rest from the way Zayn’s shoulders tense—to understand. Suddenly the room feels chilly, a bone-deep cold that radiates from Zayn, and Niall almost expects the piece of paper in his hand to frost over and crumble into a heap of ice chips.

“No thanks, bro,” Zayn says, very quietly. “We don’t need to muck about in people’s lives.”

In that moment Niall understands why Zayn has simply disappeared in the past. He can see the appeal in it, the safety in just shaking apart and falling through the cracks in this old house. He’d rather be anywhere else, anywhere he wouldn’t have to see the way Zayn crumples the paper and his fingers go through the lines and ink. “Sorry,” he whispers, trying hard to keep any trace of defensiveness out of his voice.

“Maybe it’s best if we don’t call anyone’s mum and ruin the fun,” Louis says, twisting the cord of one of his broken headphones around his fingers. “What would we even say? ‘Hiya, we’re ghosts, mind if we pop in for tea’?”

Harry seems to pick up Louis’ tone, clapping his hands on his knees as he floats above the duvet. “Hey, what would you serve at a ghostie tea?” Niall smiles weakly, and even Liam and Zayn look slightly more relaxed. Harry grins, and raises his eyebrows with the air of someone quite pleased with himself. “Booberry scones!”

“That was terrible, mate,” Liam shakes his head with a crinkly-eyed smile, glancing at Zayn cautiously.

“You’re a true horror,” Louis nods, grabbing Harry by the wrist and yanking him down before toppling over the edge of the bed in a giggling pile.

Harry squawks something about a knee being in his kidneys, and Louis screeches triumphantly, and when Niall dares to look over at him again, Zayn’s still a little too pale, but there’s a faint smile around the corners of his mouth. 

Zayn slips between the sheets beside him that night, anyway, and Niall dares to hope he hasn’t mucked anything up too badly.

;

They do more “organizing” the next day, and Niall will gladly admit it’s far easier to handle the awards and pick through the junk when his boys are beside him. It’s Louis, of course, who starts the “remember?” game, and one by one they join in, hesitantly smiling over random objects and pulling things Niall had stuck into dark corners into the light.

It feels like a proper reclaiming—not just for Niall, but for the boys, arguing over things Niall’s misplaced or hadn’t bothered taking out of boxes. With the four of them there, Niall’s finding he doesn’t have to skirt around the things he’s scared of.

The weather outside may still be rough and wintery, but Niall feels like the castle is thawing with every day he wakes up to Louis’ laughter or Harry’s bad puns. Even though it’s still a little painful when Liam discovers the Brit and Louis mimes a handjob, crows, “Harry’s getting head!” just like he had that night, Niall can remember it with a smile in the first time in forever.

“Y’know, I’ve been, like, thinking about it,” Harry says with a little smile, petting the helmet on one of the VMA moonmen. “You know how ghosts usually are supposed to have like, unfinished business, and that’s what’s kept them back? So like if they figure it out, they get to go?”

“D’you think we’ve got unfinished business, Haz?” Liam frowns. He tries and fails to steal the flag off the moonman, too slow as Harry snatches it out of the way and sticks his tongue out at him.

Zayn remains deathly quiet. Niall fights down a sick feeling in his stomach. Maybe they should’ve left everything in boxes. Left well enough alone. 

“Our only unfinished business is we’ve left one of our own here,” Louis says, decisive. He meets each of the boys’ eyes with fierce determination, and if he lingers just a bit longer on Zayn, no one mentions it. “Can’t abandon our Nialler, can we lads?”

“Never,” Liam says, as determined as he ever was, backing Louis up on business. 

“That’s what I was getting to,” Harry says, frowning a bit. “Like, the longer we’re here the stronger we get, right? It’s not like, we’re not… I dunno, fading, or summat. We’re meant to be here, I think. And we’re not going anywhere.”

“We’ve been here a while, haven’t we?” Liam points out. “Like, I don’t... I honestly can’t really tell how long,” he says, and it feels like an apology when he tips his head at Niall, “but it feels like a while to me. Just watch, now it’ll have been like, a week and I just haven’t kept track.”

“It _is_ hard to keep track of time,” Zayn says, obviously relieved with the change of subject. “It’s not just you, Li, I dunno either.”

“It’s nearly two months,” Niall confirms. “Mid-March, now, innit?”

“Missed my birthday,” Harry pouts, handing Liam the moonman.

“Mine, too,” Louis sighs. Niall would rather not think about that one.

Zayn doesn’t point out that they missed his as well, but when Niall glances at him, he makes a face. Niall wonders if he’d forgotten it at the time, like the others, or just not said anything.

“Well, this blows,” Louis says, rocking back and forth on his bum, holding his feet. “We should have a party for all the things we missed.” He looks at Niall, suddenly pointed. Niall knows that look. Louis is planning something. “We should have a bonfire! Like back at the bungalow, except now we’ve got a fuckin’ _castle_ to do it in.” 

“We’re not having a bonfire _inside_ , Tommo,” Liam deadpans, giving him a look. “That’s called _arson_ ,” he says very seriously. Niall’s suddenly reminded that two days before, Liam had asked if he could use Niall’s phone to download an app. He can guess which one, now.

“Yeah, what if Niall gets hurt?” Harry adds, giving Niall’s shoulder a gentle, feline headbutt.

Louis heaves a sigh. “I suppose we could take it out to the beach,” he concedes. 

Niall tilts his head into Harry’s chilly curls and breathes a sigh of relief.

;

It’s slightly tricky, putting together a bonfire to satisfy Louis’ flare for drama and celebration, when only Niall can do the lifting. They’d all decided it might be traumatizing for Reilly to see floating logs working their way down the beach path from the shed. But Niall’s knee is still acting up, and it takes longer than they’d anticipated just getting the firewood down to the shore. 

The lads act as cheerleaders of sorts, following Niall up and down the trail and chattering away to keep him entertained. Winter’s beginning to wind down, and with it the strong wind currents Harry’s afraid will blow him away, but Louis insists they should all hold hands for maximum wind-proofing and nobody complains about it.

When they all head inside for Niall’s cup of hot tea and to warm his knee up before they haul one more stack of wood down, Reilly has a pack of biscuits already open on the kitchen table beside the newspaper. Louis and Liam pile up on each other to read the funnies over his shoulder, and Niall tries not to laugh at them, or the way Reilly tucks his jacket more firmly around his shoulders. As Niall has a biscuit with his tea, he’s tempted to be sorry the boys can’t partake with him, but it’s enough to have them so close, hovering, sharing in the experience. He’s distracted, thinking of it, when Reilly clears his throat. “I could give you a hand with the wood, if ye like.” 

Louis looks up from the comics and frowns, mimes a cutting-off motion. Even Liam looks a bit insulted, peering at Niall upside from where he’s moved to do sit-ups on the light over the sink. 

“Nah,” Niall says. “I’m good. It’s… something I need to do, I think.”

Reilly shrugs, “Suit y’self, lad. Just don’t want to be hauling your wet arse out of the ocean again.”

“How _rude_ ,” an invisible Harry grumbles in Niall’s ear, and he nearly snorts up his tea.

Reilly raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment, and Niall hightails it out of the kitchen. He can feel the boys tumbling after him, raucous with poorly stifled laughter.

;

The sun’s just starting to set, turning the sky a streaky orange and pink, by the time Louis is satisfied with the size of their wood pile. That is, of course, when they realize they haven’t any matches, although Liam did think to bring yesterday’s newspaper out of the bin for starter. So Niall treks back to the house one last time, his boys following together like the fold-and-cut paper dolls girls made in his primary school. 

When he doesn’t immediately find any matches in the kitchen junk drawer, they all look about. “We could siphon the petrol out of the cars,” Louis muses, but that’s shot down quickly. Niall isn’t the only one who breathes a sigh of relief. 

“We’d still need summat to _start_ it with,” Zayn points out. 

Niall brightens, and then forces himself to be cautious, careful when he asks, “We could use one of your lighters? I’ve got one upstairs, I think.”

Zayn looks hesitant, but Louis shoves at him. “That’ll do nicely, Nialler. Let’s have Liam fetch it.”

With only nominal grumbling about being treated like a retriever, Liam disappearing into the ceiling. He’s back within a minute, tossing the lighter to Louis, who passes it to Harry, who only fumbles it a little on its way to Niall. There’s still a little fluid at the bottom, and Niall grins, pockets it. “Right. Let’s get the craic started.”

They take the last hike down to the beach a bit too quickly for Niall’s bum knee, but they’re too excited to slow down, chattering about the last time they had a bonfire back at the bungalow. The evening is unusually calm, with nothing but a gentle, sparse breeze that couldn’t blow the lads away. Niall brings along a couple of leftover sausages wrapped up in a napkin, and he sets them down on his piece of driftwood, a safe distance from the unlit pyre, while Liam and Harry stuff newspaper pages into the gaps between logs and Louis plays with the lighter, offering the flame to Zayn, whose fingertips don’t burn when he holds them over the fire.

“Right, so if we light the newspapers at the bottom first, the fire will move up and the logs should catch it,” Liam says, admiring his handiwork.

 “How practical, dear Payno,” Louis grins and tackles him into the sand, kissing his cheeks just to be obnoxious. “Proper cub scout!”

Liam sticks out his tongue but seems to accept the spirit of the compliment, digging his thumbs into the soft bits of Louis’ hips and dragging his trousers down. Louis yelps as if the sand is a proper inconvenience, getting into his pants. Harry makes a cackling-yelping sound of delight.

When Niall looks away from their ridiculous little pile, Zayn’s crouched down, lighter in hand and lower lip between his teeth. “Figured if someone didn’t get this going we’d sit here in the dark all night,” he explains, looking up at Niall.

“True, that,” Niall laughs. He can’t crouch down like Zayn because of his knee, but he steps closer. 

Zayn seems to be having trouble with the lighter, can’t quite keep his thumb down solidly enough after flicking the spark for the flame to hold longer than two or three seconds. “Can I help?” Niall offers, and plops down on his bum rather ungracefully next to Zayn.

“Yeah, it’s just—it’s stupid,” Zayn shakes his head, handing the lighter to Niall.

Just as Liam predicted, once the newspaper bits at the bottom have caught fire it’s a done deal, and the boys take their seats by the fire, Niall on his piece of driftwood, Louis next to him with his legs over Liam’s lap and Harry’s head nestled on his own, and Zayn at Niall’s other side, cool in comparison to the warmth of the fire before them.

“Remember how good marshmallows are on the fire?” Harry says, plaintively fond. 

“Sausages were so good, too,” Liam says, nodding at the one Niall’s skewered with a stick to toast.

Louis kicks his heels. “You always did love a good sausage, didn’t you Liam?”

“Pots and kettles, Lou,” Harry reminds him with a sigh.

“Oh, _pot_ ,” Louis says, with a whine. “Zayn, d’you remember the time we hotboxed the bunks?”

“Set off Harry’s asthma,” Zayn says, with an arched eyebrow. But he grins, shooting a glance across at Harry. “It was wicked.”

“I suppose now you just get to float all the time?” Liam offers, and Louis pinches his nipple for it.

Harry rakes his fingers across the sand, eyes bright in the firelight. “I suppose it could be worse, don’t you think? Like, the castle’s cool, and we can fly and stuff. Can still sort of cuddle.” 

“The castle’s right posh as fuck,” Louis nods, sounding approving as he glances up at the dark shape of it behind them. Niall’s secretly pleased; he knows it isn’t the sort of house Louis would’ve chosen, but to hear that Louis approves warms him up quicker than the bonfire at their feet. Louis always liked having space enough to share, room for all the people he loves brought together, and even now his presence makes the castle feel warm and alive. 

“Glad you like it,” Niall mumbles around a mouthful of sausage, smiles a little. _Glad you’re here with me_ , he doesn’t say.

“Not to mention,” Louis says, sing-songing, “there’s the snogging, too.”

Harry sighs, flopping over Louis’ lap and smiling up at him dreamily. He looks like he’s swooning, and Niall has to turn away his own grin to the fire. Somehow they can still make Niall blush. 

“Kissing’s good,” Liam agrees, and it’s not until Niall looks back over at him with his shaved head that he remembers Liam had still been in the aftermath of his breakup with Danielle when they had the accident. It’s not like when they were still together, Liam didn’t sometimes kiss his bandmates, or like that little habit the five of them shared was the cause for the breakup. Once they _did_ call it quits, however, Liam sought the boys out for comfort more than ever, and more often than not, that included kissing. 

Niall thinks about adding his own agreement, but like so many times before, he’s caught up in how nice it is just to be surrounded by his boys, letting them talk, listening. He can’t help his stupid barking laugh, though, when Louis claps his hands and says, “Right!” like he’s about to make an announcement. 

“I think,” Louis says, standing up, and grabbing the unopened beer bottle from the sand at Niall’s feet, “We ought to have a game. Like we used to. A One Direction classic, if you will.”

“Yes,” Harry hisses, and rubs his hands together delightedly. 

“Quiet, Curly,” Louis says. “So, lads, who’s up for a round of spin the bottle?”

There isn’t really any use saying no to Louis in these situations, so they all go along with it—even Zayn, who purses his lips and shrugs, to Niall’s surprise. They quickly find out that playing spin the bottle with a full bottle and no flat surface is pretty much impossible, but that doesn’t deter Louis, who bends and breaks the rules to his favor.

He chooses Liam as his first victim, which has never been unusual. It’s a fair bit sloppier than the kiss Niall walked in on around a week ago, though; they’ve obviously been practicing. Then it’s Harry and Liam, who can’t stop giggling at each other for much more than a peck, and then Louis is spinning the bottle again, topsy turvy in the sand, and crowing, “Well, Nialler, I suppose it’s been a long time coming!” He flounces into Niall’s lap and Niall could swear that for a second he actually feels the _weight_ of him, straddling his thighs. 

“You gonna make an honest man out of me, Tommo?” Niall grins, and Louis doesn’t waste time with a response, diving in to press his lips, to the best of his abilities, against Niall’s. The chill is the same Niall’s gotten used to by now, pins and needles, but with the warmth of the fire so close by he can pretend there’s a little more there; more pressure, more softness, and more _Louis_.

And then Louis _licks_ him. He darts back almost immediately, grinning so wide it seems likely to break his face in two, and Niall can only stare, but he could _swear_ it happened. Cold like Louis had just been drinking a slurpee, or had ice cream, but definite. 

“Isn’t he the best at it,” Harry breathes, sounding desperately fond. “He’s so good at snogging.”

“Sappy Harry,” Zayn says, teasing, and Niall’s almost too dazed, still, to register it.

“You give it a go, then, Zayn,” Louis says, pointing the capped end of the bottle in the sand at Zayn. “I dare you.”

Niall’s smiling dizzily from the kiss when he looks over at Zayn. It takes him a second to process that Zayn isn’t giving him the same look back: he’s staring just beyond Niall to Louis, face flat and mouth thinned. Niall wants to tell him not to bite at his cheek like that, but he supposes it doesn’t matter now. He rubs his hand across his mouth.

“Nah, mate,” Zayn says, so coldly it aches in every single one of Niall’s bones. “I’m good.”

Louis stares right back, and his smile is brittle. “You’re the only one who’s missing out, Malik. At least give it a try, won’t you? What’cha scared of?” 

Zayn’s gone without a sound, without a trace left in the sand or steps for the boys to follow.

“Fuck,” says Harry, sounding panicked. “Fuck, where’d he go? Louis!”

“I don’t know,” says Louis, defensive, crossing his arms and glaring at the fire. “He wasn’t supposed to just _vanish_.”

Liam sighs. “What was he supposed to do, then, Tommo? You know he’s all…” Liam winces. “It wasn’t very nice, of you, considering.”

Niall just sits there, quietly cold and blinking hard to keep the wind out of his eyes. The tears, too. He’s just so tired of being confused and afraid to say the wrong thing and of _losing_ Zayn like this, over and over again. 

“What if he doesn’t make it back to the castle?” Harry gasps, sounding almost like he would when he needed his asthma puffer, running around onstage with a head cold. The scar across his face seems darker the more upset he gets, translucent bruises darkening over his collarbones seemingly out of nowhere. “Lou, what if he gets lost? He could—he could just blow away!”

“Let’s go back inside,” Liam suggests, brows furrowed. “He’s probably there, yeah? C’mon, it’ll all be okay,” he says, a reassurance to himself rather than the boys as he takes Harry’s hand and stands up. 

Louis kicks a bit of sand into the fire and looks up at them. There’s a bruise pulsing dark beside his right eye, and he looks sad. “Should we do something about the fire?” he asks, and it isn’t an apology, but Liam takes his hand, too. 

Niall shakes his head. He doesn’t care if it spreads down the entire beach. He’s got to find Zayn. “Let it burn.”

Harry’s face looks wet, and Niall knows then, with a startling clarity, that he has to fix this, not just for Zayn, or even him and Zayn, but for all of them. He takes Harry’s other hand and lets Liam lead them away from the fire and up the path to the castle.

;

“If we split up,” Liam says, hesitantly, as Niall stomps wet sand off his trainers in the front hall, “we might find him faster. Lou and I could take this floor, and—” 

Niall shakes his head. “No, I have to… I think I need to do this alone, lads.”

“We’ll wait for you in your room,” Liam nods. He still hasn’t let go of Harry’s hand, but Louis has moved to Harry’s other side, pressed up so close to him Niall isn’t sure where one ends and the other begins.

As Niall grips the bannister to start up the stairs, knee twinging even on the second step, Louis calls out, “He’ll be in the attic, Nialler.” It’s not an apology, but it’s enough.

Niall nods and looks back at them, their three worried faces washed pale in the dim light. Liam gives him a thumbs up. Niall swallows, worry lodged painfully in his throat, and takes the steps one at a time. It’s about time he followed after Zayn instead of just letting him run.

He hasn’t been up to the attic since Harry stole his snapback what feels like ages ago. The stairs feel steeper, somehow, the passageway narrower, but the sense of inevitability is exactly the same as it was then, coming full circle.

The door at the top isn’t closed, and the shadows are deeper, longer than they were the first time he braved this trip. Even before he takes the last step he can tell the attic is dark, moonlight pale on the floor as the dust motes tremble in the chilled air. The floorboards creak under Niall’s feet and he feels as achy as they must, nerves heavy and cold in his stomach. Most of the boxes are gone, clearing Niall’s path to the red leather sofa, but he’s frozen in place, feet glued to the floor.

Zayn is curled up in the corner; what Niall can see of him, anyway, edges so soft they’re fading, flickering every so often like he’s a blurry image, something cast by a scratched projector. Niall thought ghosts couldn’t really cry, but everything about Zayn suggests he might be, shoulders twitching with something akin to quiet little sobs, head tucked down into the tufted arm of the sofa. 

Niall’s eyes well up, throat constricting, because he’s shit at not joining in when one of the boys is having a good sob. His sniffle, smothered into his hand as he wipes his nose, knuckles at his burning eyes, sounds too loud in the attic. Even before he moves his hand away from his eyes, he knows Zayn has seen him.

Niall clears his throat, sniffs again, because there’s no point trying to hide it, wipes at his hot cheeks and then rubs his palms over his jeans awkwardly. “Hey.”

“What’re you doing up here?” Zayn asks, sounding as miserable as Niall’s ever heard him, like the worst combination of woken up too early and needing a cigarette and getting the phone call about his aunt’s death when they were in New York. In another life, Niall might be sorry for feeling as relieved by it as he does. But the absence of anger in Zayn’s voice is as much as he could hope for, right now. He takes a step forward hesitantly.

“Was getting old,” Niall says, and his voice is steadier than he’d expected it would be, “the whole thing where you ran away and we just let you.”

Zayn lifts his head, sits up so his forearm is resting on the arm of the sofa and his legs are curled up beneath him, shoulders hunched. “I wasn’t running away,” he shrugs. “Where would I go, anyway? It’s not like I can just up and leave.”

The lump in Niall’s throat and the weight in his stomach converge somewhere around his lungs, and he can’t breathe. In all his joy in their presence, he’d never even wondered if the boys might not want to stay. He remembers Louis and Harry’s assertion that the only unfinished business they have is Niall himself, that they couldn’t, wouldn’t leave him behind. For the first time, Niall wonders if Zayn feels differently. He can barely ask it, voice coming out a whisper. “Would you? Would you leave, I mean. If you could.”

“ _What?_ ” Zayn almost hisses, hands curling into fists, brows furrowing. For the first time, something about him changes, the hair behind his ear appearing matted like there’s something underneath, a cut like the one Liam has or a soft bruise, or maybe a mixture of both. Niall can’t quite see it too well from this angle, but he’s afraid he wouldn’t want to if he could, not with the way Zayn’s bruised as far as the side of his neck, a shadow beneath his ear. When he tips his head just so, there’s a gash on his cheekbone, and another on his chin. “Niall, fuck’s sake, I’m _dead_ ,” he spits. There’s another cut coming from beneath his fringe. “This is it, mate. This is all I get.”

Niall looks at him and he wants to be like a little kid, cover his eyes and peek between his fingers, scared to see and afraid not to. Zayn’s entire face is mottled, now, black and purple and blue and Niall wants to touch him but when he takes another step forward Zayn winces, wrapping his arms tighter around himself and looking away. “But...” Niall starts, without any idea how to continue. 

“You don’t get it,” Zayn shakes his head, keeps his eyes down. “You don’t get what it’s like, Niall. When we—when we came back, after, it was like trying to wake up when you _know_ you’re having a nightmare, but the more you try, the harder it gets. We’re not even supposed to _be here_ , who knows how long it’s gonna last? It’s not fucking fair, okay, and it’s _hard_.”

Niall inches forward, knee throbbing in time with the rabbit pace of his heart. It’s worse, suddenly, like a phantom remembrance awakened by the injuries on Zayn’s face. Or maybe just a feeling Zayn’s chosen to share. “I know,” he says. “I mean, I _don’t_ know, you’re right, but…”

“It’s just,” Zayn huffs, and his eyes are liquid when he looks up at Niall, “there’s got to be a reason I’m here with you boys and not like, haunting my mum or—or Perrie, y’know? Some sort of unfinished business, like the lads said, and. That scares me, alright? I don’t want to leave, Niall, ‘m already dead, I don’t know what—” Zayn closes his eyes, his fists balled up tight. “I don’t know what comes next, except I know it won’t be you lads, and that terrifies me.”

Niall stares at him for a moment. It’s not something they’ve exactly talked about, in the months the boys have been at the castle; Louis had said there was no white light and they’d all laughed, but it wasn’t something they brought up. But Niall doesn’t believe for a second that his boys are going anywhere beyond this without him. Not if they’ve stuck around this long. “You don’t have any unfinished business,” Niall says, as strongly as he can muster, stepping towards Zayn. “You’re not going anywhere. Not without me. ‘S why you’re _here_ , Zayn.”

Zayn is shaking now, hard, more like a violent shiver, less like a light close to burning out. It’s a strange thing to find reassuring, but Niall is relieved anyway. He sits down on the couch gingerly, his hand inches from Zayn’s knee. “How can you be _sure_?” Zayn asks. He sounds small and uncertain, and Niall wants to reach out to him just to prove that it’s all going to be alright.

Maybe that’s it, after all. Niall smiles, biting his lip, and bumps his shoulder against Zayn’s. It goes through, mostly, numbing Niall’s arm, but it feels right. “I love you,” he says, and leans over.

Zayn doesn’t run, this time. Niall doesn’t give him the time to, steadying himself with a hand on Zayn’s knee, turning Zayn’s face with his palm on Zayn’s jaw and pressing their mouths together decisively. Niall isn’t even sure how it works, really: he can _feel_ how delicate Zayn is beneath his hands, wispier to the touch than any of the other boys. But he holds on, even when it feels like clutching at a cloud, snatching at smoke, and it must have some effect because Zayn shifts under his touch but doesn’t disappear. Niall can’t feel his mouth, can’t feel much of his own face, really, but he keeps his eyes closed and imagines it, the plush of Zayn’s lower lip and the way he’d bite back. When he feels teeth on his lip, he grins, and pulls back. Zayn looks shell shocked, running his tongue over his own lips and staring at him wide-eyed. “See?” Niall says, gently. 

Zayn looks back at him for a second, and then he leans forward so fast that if he had any weight, he’d have bowled Niall over. His skinny arms wrap around Niall’s neck, and Niall kisses him back laughingly, feeling as light as Zayn is for a split second. It turns out that much like with the others, the longer they kiss, the better Zayn gets at it, his lips feeling less like cool air and more like a proper mouth. Niall is nearly bursting with the thought of telling the others, if they aren’t already listening in, he supposes; right now, though, he’s too busy feeling Zayn fill out under his fingertips. 

They kiss until even Zaynis panting, even though he doesn’t _need_ to, his fingers clutching at the back of Niall’s shirt and actually bunching it up. “I was so scared,” Zayn whispers, looking down at him, and the bruises flicker across his face.

Niall nods and slides his hand up Zayn’s cheek, thumb brushing the shell of his ear as he presses his fingertips gently back into Zayn’s hair. He can’t feel the wound, even looking straight at it, bloodied hair and crushed bone barely held together under the skin; even as he watches the marks begin to fade, knitting together under his touch. Zayn shudders, and Niall leans up to kiss him again. “Me too,” he says, pressed to Zayn’s lips, “me too, but. Not anymore.”

;

That night when they’re tucked into bed, Louis and Harry curled up like cats at the foot of the bed and Liam swaying gently between the bedposts, Niall dials his mum. Zayn is snuggled up tight against his side, making Niall shiver even through the blanket (he’s pretty sure that Zayn’s cold toes have stopped pressing at his calves so much as passed _through_ his calves), but he’s not going to complain. 

“Niall?” His mum sounds a bit like he’s woken her up, but she’ll never admit it, too relieved to hear from him to care about the time. 

“Hey, ma,” Niall says. He can feel Louis wrapping a chilly hand around his ankle over the blanket, and Liam is smiling at him from a couple of feet above.

“I’ve missed you, son,” Maura sighs, echoing through the speaker. “How’re you feeling?”

Niall doesn’t think twice on his answer—not with his boys surrounding him. “Good,” he says. Niall grins and closes his eyes. The boys will be right there when he opens them again, he knows it. “Really good.”

**Author's Note:**

>  **Additional warnings ( here lie spoilers):** pre-fic major character deaths, mentions of a car accident (not explicitly described), brief but graphic descriptions of physical wounds (esp. grave cuts, bruises, burns). 
> 
> This fic happened for a variety of reasons. It started with S, because she saw [this](http://i44.tinypic.com/i7318z.jpg) picture and, for reasons she will never quite understand, reblogged it with the tags “#au where there's a terrible accident #and niall buys himself a castle #and learns to live alone.” We owe quite a lot to the authors of [You Were Driving Circles Around Me](http://archiveofourown.org/works/536523), [Weight Will Turn To Sunlight](http://archiveofourown.org/works/550554), and [To Try And Catch Your Shadow](http://pandlewords.livejournal.com/961.html) for making us want more ghost!boys, and to [Sweet Turning Sour](http://archiveofourown.org/works/631029) for giving S horrible “what if we wrote-” thoughts. After writing around 10k in two days early in 2013, we dropped it like a hot coal due to artistic differences. If only those gdoc back-and-forths and that phone conversation were screencapped and recorded, because it was horrifying (but funnier now, a whole year later).
> 
> A lot of people helped us through writing this fic and we’d be lost without their encouragement, yelling, love, and willingness to do writing sprints with us; including Nadine [idctbqh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/idctbqh), [Hezza](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hezza), Gina [castoffstarter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/castoffstarter), & Lindsay [icecreamsocialist](http://archiveofourown.org/users/icecreamsocialist). We would also like to extend a special thank you to Brie [Coolbreeeze](http://archiveofourown.org/users/coolbreeeze), our magnificent beta, for keeping track of our Ps, Qs, and stray bowls of green beans; and Lo [hungerpunch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hungerpunch), who was the first person to really have a proper look at the monster we’d spawned and was nothing but supportive from the very beginning.


End file.
